If a software update is available, then you will be prompted to download the update from the Quicken Web site. Quicken for Mac 2009 customers: Choose Quicken 2009 menu Check for Updates. Quicken for Mac 2007 customers: Choose Quicken 2007 menu Check for Updates. DOWNLOAD THE LATEST QUICKEN UPDATE (ALL customers) 1. Quicken is a Personal finance software that makes it easy to manage your spending, stay on top of day-to-day finances, and stick to a budget.You can switch to Quicken Essentials for Mac. The options are not pretty: However, since I love the Mac, and I love Quicken, I’m desperately looking for a way out of this problem.Problem: Mac OS X Lion (10.7) is imminentIt links to this blog post on the Intuit site. Intuit has really backed themselves into a corner, and not surprisingly, Apple has no interest in bailing them out. Manage your investments: See how.So it pains me to write this blog post, because the situation with Quicken for the Mac has become extremely dire.But once again, “This option is ideal if maintaining your transaction history is not important to you.” Yeesh. I love Mint, and I’ve been using it for years. So I’m going with them on this one. And they can put you in jail and take everything you own. At least, the IRS thinks so. In their words, “this option is ideal if you do not track investment transactions and history, use online bill pay or rely on specific reports that might not be present in Quicken Essentials for Mac.” Um, sorry, who in their right mind doesn’t want to track “investment transactions”? Turns out, at tax time, knowing the details of what you bought, at what price, and when are kind of important.
![]() ![]() After all, Apple was dying. Hey, they thought it was the prudent thing to do then. Around 2000, Intuit made the mistake of abandoning the Mac. But the Trojan War involved tens of thousands of troops, so I’m going with Homer’s definition of “Epic”.There are really three issues at play here: I’m not sure how many people are actually affected. Sometime in the past few years, someone decided that Quicken Essentials for the Mac didn’t need to track investment transactions properly. Untouchable, unfortunately, means unfixable. From everything I hear, Quicken 2007 for the Mac might as well be written in Fortran and require punch cards to compile. This led Intuit to massively under-invest in their Mac codebase, yielding a monstrosity that apparently no one in their right mind wants to touch. Yes, that’s *six* years ago. Apple announces the move from PowerPC chips to Intel chips in June 2005. (See note on the IRS above) It’s a bizarre miss given that tracking investment transactions is a basic tax requirement. But in the end, it was a very expensive decision, and even if it was necessary, it should have mandated a fast follow with that capability. It’s not like Apple was going back to PowerPC.If you examine the three strikes, you see that Intuit made a couple of tactical & strategic mistakes here. They dropped support for Mac OS Classic in just a few years. You are talking about the company that killed floppy drives almost immediately in favor of USB in 2000, with no warning. Intuit had six years to make this migration, and to be honest, Apple is rarely the type of company to support long transitions like this. Microsoft did too much of this with Windows over the past two decades, and it definitely held them back at an operating system level.A Proposed Solution: VMware to the rescueI believe there is a possible solution. They do not want to create zombie applications that necessitate bug-for-bug fixes over the long term. They want to push software developers to new code, new user experience, and best-in-class applications. They want to simplify the operating system (brutally). Or maybe they could license Rosetta to Intuit to bundle with Quicken 2007.Apple’s not going to do it. Quicken 2007 Support Install Of MacMany system utilities are distributed with stripped, headless versions of Mac OS X. Quicken 2007 R4 installed / configured to run at launchOK, this solution isn’t perfect, but it is plausible. Custom “headless” install of Mac OS X 10.6.8, stripped to just support the launch of Quicken 2007. If this is true, this reflects a fundamental shift in Apple’s attitude toward this technology. I’m guessing that Intuit & VMware might be able to work out a deal here, especially since Intuit would be promoting VMware to a large number of Mac users, and even subsidizing it’s adoption.This is always the $64,000 question, but theoretically, this feels like really not much of a give on Apple’s part. They can distribute new images as necessary.The cost of VMware Fusion for the Mac is non trivial, but actually roughly the same price as a new version of Quicken. A VMware image allows Intuit to configure & test a standard release package, and ensure it works. But my larger point is: there are several worthwhile alternatives to Intuit’s products, many of them developed exclusively for the Mac. My sales spiel ends there. I’m the marketing whiz at IGG Software, so that’s where I’m coming from.IGG makes iBank, an excellent, Lion-ready alternative to Quicken or Mac. So I’m hoping we can all find a path here.I think this all very interesting, but the post seems to dodge the most obvious solution.First: full disclosure. I buy TurboTax every year, and I use Quicken every week. If Intuit can’t work this out, I just might try to hack this solution myself.In the end, I’m a loyal Intuit customer. Maybe a future column here can examine a few of those alternatives.Ever since receiving “the” notorious email from Intuit 2 days ago about Quicken 2007 going away with Lion, I started looking into iBank4. And that means finding Mac personal finance software that works. But most users just want a simple solution that meets their needs. Or create a Windows partition, or a Snow Leopard partition, to run a different Quicken version. Yes, each has its limitations or characteristics that make them fundamentally different from Quicken, or from one another.If you’re committed to both Lion and Intuit, fine – run Essentials. Download excel online file for macEven though there’s the usual File>Page Setup… menu item, it doesn’t seem to work. So, if you’re like me and have a checking account register that goes back many years, you may get an 80-page printout! Not good if all you’re looking for is the last month or so.I’ve found a kludgy way around some of this by using a feature called “Smart Account”, which works sort of OK however you can’t format the printout into landscape mode or even scale it to make it fit on one page. If you try to do a simple print of, e.g., your checking account in iBank you are given no option for selecting a time frame (or range of check numbers). This is easy to do in Quicken, but not so with iBank.Another type of report I use frequently with Quicken is “Print Register” (e.g., my checking account) for a particular time period – again, very easy to do in Quicken. With Quicken I frequently use the “QuickReport” feature to either display or print a list of, e.g., payments to a particular payee or payments to a category, for a specific time range, from a particular account or from all accounts.
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