Warning: Don't install Parallels on Catalina if you don't wanna brick your machine!

I got a brand new MacBook Pro 2019 with a clean install of Mac OS Catalina.


Installed all my apps which are a few anyway, configured everything to my liking, then I bought a license for Parallels 15 Home just in case I wanted to run Windows for testing things and tweaks that I normally do.


I installed it, all went fine, it asked me to give it a permission in the system preferences to allow access which I did. The app worked just fine. I went on about my day and was using the laptop with 0 issues.


Then for some reason I thought hey let me do a reboot after having installed so many apps. I rebooted, saw the progress bar moving then it stopped around 70%, then the screen went black and the fans started spinning. I let it sit there for a while but no luck so I force shut it down and booted up again, same thing. The machine was FUBAR.


I didn't have a clue what happened at this point. So after formatting and re-installing Catalina, before touching anything, I installed Parallels 15 again, the moment I rebooted the same issue happened so isolated the issue down to Parallels bricking the system for some weird reason even though on their site they claim that it IS compatible with Catalina!


I contacted their tech support and they tried convincing me to install it again and troubleshoot so they can pin point the issue but I said no thank you I am not planning on wasting yet another day reinstalling everything if it didn't work.



Long story short, don't try to install Parallels in the near future until they have sorted this issue.

 

Brother, you went to a Mac to avoid this all-day reinstall nonsense! Of course it happens when you try to install Windows...

 

True bro, I don't know what I was thinking. You see, I still want to be on top of things in Windows so I can provide you guys with the best guides and whatnot so instead of me getting some cheap laptop to work on, I thought hey why not try this Parallels, big mistake. Don't get me wrong the macOS is rock solid and very secure, anything fishy or any system setting you may want to change requires a password or fingerprint authentication but since Parallels digs very deep into the OS I think that's how it messed it up so badly because it did ask me to give it extra security privileges to integrate into the OS which I did.

Just wanted to put this thread as a warning for everyone to avoid Parallels like the plague (at least for now).

 

Why would you use Parallels... When I had MacBook I just used Bootcamp and installed Windows natively, this gives best performance since there is no virtualization. You do have to reboot when switching the OS but the performance worth it.

 

Bro...I'm telling you, USE boot camp! It's basically running it natively and your two OS will be isolated from each other.

 

Good to know. When I had my MB I used Windows so much it was easier to just run parallels.

 

just a small update, this issue has now been fixed.

 

I installed parallels with Catalina. No problems.