Rarely outdated Parallels versions outright 'break' but with some Mac OS releases they can, so be prepared to either outright go for their subscription payment or upgrade if you really have to should something breaks. You can therefore think also of the 'perpetual license' as a quasi subscription fee if you need to stay current and need the latest safety and functional features with Parallels. This does happen basically with every major MacOS update since years.

One word of warning though: Although Parallels is available with a perpetual license ( I use one of those), it really is setup with regular major releases designed to coerce all users into upgrading and paying upgrade fees for each major release. This is ESPECIALLY useful as Windows screws up ever so often and it is just as easy as simply copying the VM file from a backup if that happens and Windows is back up and running again without any Windows related trouble shooting needed. The other advantage here is that My SuperDuper backups backup the Windows VM with all the other content on my Mac partitions so I do not have to run any Windows specific backup annoyances but just the regular normal Mac based backups. I do not even any longer have a bootcamp installed Windows installation but run all Windows apps through a VM in Parallels.

You can configure Parallels to pretty much completely hide the entire Windows interface and only the respective apps you are launching show that they are Windows native apps as of their app UI. With Parallels I can run these apps with as little Windows interference as possible and almost pretend I am running them natively in Mac OS only.

I do run a few apps for work that are unfortunately Windows only and also depend on hard ware dongles with specialty drivers - again Windows only.

Parallel mac os