My single Fusion license has cost me $150 over the last 3 years! Thanks a lot VMware!
On the upside, it's good news that operating systems are cheaper than VMWare Fusion these days ;).
For me, Terraria was buggy and the graphics had some glitches. Half-Life had mouse issues, etc.
I used to buy Parallels but they use the same update tactics than VMWare, so now I just don't use Windows games at all.
Even the fortune 500 are complaining about VMware prices though, but they keep paying because their whole datacenters are based on it. Hopefully Hyper-V will at some point provide some counter-weight to keep VMware's pricing in check.
Faced with the decision to shell out 50€ to make it run with a 16€ OS upgrade after a little thinking, googling etc. i just went with Bootcamp & Windows 7.
While this doesn't have the convenience of just starting the VM (gotta reboot) it at least has native performance which in my use-case (3D CAD) is more desirable anyways.
And you can't beat the feeling of not being extorted anymore...
Now 5 comes out, seemingly has better retina support, and I'd have to shell out $50 again. No thanks.
Each Fusion release is less and less compelling for the most part. Fusion 4 was "built for Lion", yet I used Fusion 3 on Lion exclusively until June just fine.
BTW, it only costs $29 to upgrade to Lion and $19 to upgrade to Mountain Lion.
On the other hand, if some people _just_ bought Fusion 4 it indeed is very annoying to pay $50 again for Fusion 5. VMware should have a free upgrade program for recent purchases of 4.
Personally, after using Fusion for 4 years I switched to Parallels. With Fusion, even when Windows is idle Fusion would use up to 20% CPU (on a 4-core), sometimes triggering fans. Parallels seems less CPU hungry and runs a bit faster (though this is subjective, try it first). It also has interesting features, such as, suspending of Bootcamp installations and the ability to use all attached displays when in full screen mode. I don't think Fusion 4 supported any of those; not sure about 5. And Parallels has a $29 license right now for those switching from VMware, so it was a good deal as well.
I would love, love, love to have a free and open source option here but it's not like a web browser or something where I can live with the occasional crash or glitch.
The changing digits at the end of the names you mention (Fusion 3, 4, 5) make it sound like those are _different_ versions of the product.
Did any of them came advertising "free upgrades for life"?
If not, I don't see the point of this rant. The worked hard, implemented lots of features and put out a new version. Nobody is forced to buy, in fact the old version should still work fine.
No, it doesn't. That's the problem. Fusion 3 is buggy on Lion and doesn't run at all on Mountain Lion [1].
Though there is some truth to your point. I'm guessing it is a non-trivial amount of work to support new OS releases. Perhaps it's even more work than the new features being added. Surely they shouldn't be obligated to support old releases forever. But a discount to existing customers sure would make me less likely to explore cheaper alternatives...
[1] http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?langua...
But it's hard to use the existing version:
* they stop doing updates (bug fixes, security fixes, etc) on the existing version when they release a new one. And being a complex product, there are a lot of bugs to fix :)
* the existing versions don't work well with new OS X releases - Fusion reaches pretty deep into the OS, as I'm sure you know. I had to upgrade to Fusion 4 to make Lion work. Not sure yet about 4 on M.L.
The problem is Fusion is not really a mature product. It's a hard piece of SW to write, so the lack of maturity isn't really a problem by itself. It's just that they've effectively put me on a $50/yr SaaS plan without me realizing it.
But if I'm reading this correctly, they added back in an upgrade discount, which I think was missing with the 4 release.
Edit: here's the proper link http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/overview.html
It appears that you can upgrade from 3 or 4 to 5 Pro for $49.99. As far as I can tell, I don't need any of the Pro features. And that's the same price as buying the non-pro version outright. So not much of a deal.
https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2012/07/buy-vmware-fusio...
Would still have liked to see a discount price for upgraders, vs full price.
I'm in New Zealand BTW. Perhaps they have some problems with non-US IP addresses...?
