Parallels Desktop 16 for Mac is another solid upgrade solidifying the company’s tradition of continued improvements, but the lack of native Big Sur graphics support on Catalina—which the. Parallels Desktop shows “ components are missing from the operating system of your Mac ” on the latest Developer Beta of macOS 11 Big Sur? The reason is relatively easy to explain: Apple changed the version Number from 10.x (was 10.16 in former beta versions) to 11.0, and the Parallels Desktop version seems to have an issue with that!

Parallels Desktop 16 launched on the Mac today. It's the latest major release of the software used by developers and others to run Windows, Linux, and macOS applications and virtual machines under macOS. Its most notable offering is full support for macOS Big Sur.

According to the Parallels representatives Ars spoke with, Big Sur support was no small task: Big Sur ended support for the third-party kernel extensions that Parallels built on. That meant an enormous amount of work was required to play nice with Big Sur—25 human-years of engineering work, they claimed.

In addition to supporting Big Sur for both host machines and virtual machines, Parallels Desktop 16 has a slightly different look to fit the different appearance Apple has gone with in Big Sur.

While Big Sur support is the flagship feature here, there's a laundry list of small improvements in this release. For example, Parallels Desktop 16 supports 3D in Metal applications when running a macOS Big Sur virtual machine on a macOS Big Sur host.

Advertisement

Printers can be shared between host and virtual machines across operating systems, and support has been added for zoom and rotate gestures on multitouch trackpads for Windows apps that have zoom/rotation functionality. Parallels Desktop 16 also promises faster performance than the previous version; it claims to launch twice as fast and offer a 20-percent improvement in DirectX performance, as well as 75-percent faster 'git status' in Linux virtual machines. Support for newer versions of OpenGL has expanded which Windows apps will run in a virtual machine via Parallels.

Pro Edition users can now name their custom networks, and they can export virtual machines in a compressed format that Parallels claims are a fraction of their precompression size. Also, Parallels has launched a plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio to simplify testing on different OSes.

We asked about any plans for supporting Windows on Apple Silicon in Big Sur, but Parallels reps declined to talk about that, saying they would discuss it at a later date.

Parallels Desktop 16 will be available starting today. The standard edition is a one-time purchase at $99.99, while the Pro and Business Editions require a $99.99 per year subscription. Upgrading from Parallels Desktop 14 or 15 to the new version costs $49.99 once for the standard edition.

That package includes Parallels Toolbox, which was recently updated with new tools and features as well. Those include a screen-break tracker, a unit converter, and show desktop and window manager options for Macs.

Listing image by Apple

Apple has at last released macOS Big Sur! First previewed at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2020, and then finally released to the world in November 2020, macOS Big Sur has had the longest beta development cycle of any macOS release in recent history.

The silver lining: engineers at Parallels® used this time to work in lockstep with their Apple counterparts in an effort to ensure that users will have the best possible Parallels Desktop® experience once migrated to macOS Big Sur.

The greatest amount of Parallels engineering work came in response to a significant change in the underpinnings of macOS Big Sur. As a Mac user, you may have seen dialogs (like the one shown in Figure 1) when using macOS Catalina or macOS Mojave.

The change in the macOS necessitated the re-architecture of Parallels Desktop (seen in Figure 2).

While this figure illustrates what may appear to be a small change, it required the largest amount of engineering work in Parallels Desktop 16 and the equivalent of 25 man-years of engineering effort. This change means that even more of the performance and security of Parallels Desktop will be derived from Apple’s updates to the internal architecture of macOS going forward.

In addition to the work diagrammed in Figure 2, the Parallels engineers have added a number of new features to Parallels Desktop 16, and to bundled products Parallels Toolbox and Parallels Access, including:

• macOS Big Sur support
• 3D support in macOS VMs

Learn more about these features in Video 1.

Big Sur Parallels Network

Parallels Desktop is ready for you when you decide to migrate to macOS Big Sur. Let us know in the comments when you will be upgrading, and then, how the migration went!

KB Parallels: Install MacOS Big Sur In A Virtual Machine With Parallels ...

(C) 2020 Parallels International GmbH