David Pogue blogs mini-review of Parallels 3
, the NY Times' answer to Walt Mossberg (as distinct from "This WSJ writer, nicknamed Uncle Walt, hosted two technology legends at a 2007 conference" -- that's the Jeopardy answer to Walt Mossberg) hasn't reviewed Parallels 3.0 yet, at least not in print. On his blog, however, Pogue has given the new version an enthusiastic thumbs up.
Pogue uses Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Windows to do a large chunk of his writing (Mac voice-rec tools like TrueVoice or iListen, though available, did not measure up to his needs) which has meant either lugging two laptops around or, more recently, Boot Camp. Up until now the USB audio support in Parallels hasn't worked well enough for speech recognition to go smoothly. With the 3.0 release and an XP virtual machine (Vista was still too resource-intensive), Pogue is now running the voice-rec app completely flawlessly and happily.
Pogue's post ends with a reminder of how the platform equation is changing; he writes, "Whether you're a Mac person or a Windows person, the point is that you can now run 100 percent of the world's computer software on a single machine, faster and more easily than ever." It's no longer a matter of justifying answers to "Why would you buy a Mac?" but simply responding "Why wouldn't you buy a computer that can run all your applications, whichever platform you need?"
