VMWare Fusion

★★☆☆☆

VMWare Fusion worked great on my Intel-based MacBook for work for years. I ran Windows and Linux virtual machines, sometimes several at a time. It more or less seamlessly integrated the Windows environment into macOS, and the Linux VMs I ran were stable. I wouldn’t say I loved it, but it did the job. I’d give it 4 stars for that period of time.

Unobtainable

After Broadcom bought VMWare, though, I can’t seem to find it. Not an individual license for work. Not a free license for home. The website still lists it and Workstation (the Windows counterpart), though I haven’t found any links to that page on the website – only external search results. And it doesn’t help.

  • The download links there just go to the Broadcom customer login.
  • The customer site won’t let me see anything unless I fill in corporate purchasing info that only makes sense in an enterprise business-to-business context.
  • The only way I can get it to show download links is to back to the old blog post and click on the links there.
  • Those download links won’t work without me answering more screening questions.
  • The site won’t acknowledge that I already answered those questions.

On top of that, while Broadcom’s website let me register an email address with a + in it, it uses one of those multi-step login forms where you enter just the username/email first, click a button, and then enter the password…but it keeps trying to decode the + as a space, so I have to reload the login form in a way that it’ll keep the correct username when I enter my password.

I suppose it could be a browser compatibility thing, but I spent at least an hour at a time on three different occasions across two and half months on two different computers (one macOS, one Linux) with both Firefox and Vivaldi.

Meanwhile I missed the November announcement that it’s now free for everyone, which, OK, great…but it still won’t show me the products in my account unless I go back to May’s blog post, and it still won’t let me download without answering the screening questions, and it still won’t acknowledge that I’ve answered those screening questions, so I still can’t download it.

Technically Available

It’s almost like Broadcom didn’t notice that VMWare had a consumer software division when they bought the company, and they don’t know how to deal with that. So they’ve made it available…in the sense that the plans for demolishing Arthur Dent’s house were “on display.”

So I have no idea how well it runs on Apple Silicon. And it doesn’t matter whether I like the product or not, because I can’t use it.

Alternatives

I was able to download and install Parallels for my new ARM work MacBook in a matter of minutes. I didn’t even have to wait for IT to purchase the license, just install the trial edition and add the license afterward.

As for home, I think I’ll experiment with UTM a bit. I prefer one-time purchases over subscriptions (and of course free is nice!), but the home edition of Parallels is at least a reasonable price for what it does.