According to a FAQ updated today, Intuit is proceeding with earlier rumored plans to update their Quicken for Mac 2007 product with OS X 10.7 Lion compatibility. Since it was originally developed for PowerPC based Macs, Quicken required the Rosetta emulator to run on modern Intel-based Macs. Apple removed Rosetta support in Lion.
I suppose this is good news for the few Mac users out there who purchased their supposed successor, Quicken Essentials (most reviews panned that product as lacking much of the old Quicken’s functionality). But really, how much sense does it make for a company to invest programming time and effort into what’s now almost a five-year-old product? Is it too much to ask for them to just focus on a Quicken 2012 release that’s not only Lion compatible, but has feature parity with the Windows version?
Over two years ago, I switched to using iBank, a shareware product that allows automatic importing of Quicken data and never looked back. I know others just went the cloud route with Mint. Intuit just doesn’t seem to get the idea that Mac users want current software that’s just as capable as what our Microsoft-using counterparts use.
Hi Tom:
I don’t think it’s so much the case that Intuit has decided that “Mac users like being stuck in 2007”, but rather more the case that Intuit finds it just a whole lot easier (for themselves, at least) to create an Intel-based emulator like patch for the Rosetta PowerPC emulator (an emulator of an emulator, if you will) that works as an Intel-PPC-Quicken go between under OS X Lion. Surely, to build an all new Quicken 2012 for Mac, one that works natively under OS X 10.7, would be a project requiring a lot more development work on Intuit’s part, and it’s clear that Intuit is not quit up to the task at this time. Who knows, perhaps someday….