#Quicken essentials for mac vs ibank upgrade#
#Quicken essentials for mac vs ibank full#
#Quicken essentials for mac vs ibank code#

When I talked with Forth, the day after Lion launched, Intuit customer support lines were not overwhelmed with customers who didn't get the message. Intuit, at least, did warn its Quicken 2007 users, via e-mail campaign, that upgrading to Lion would strand their data. IBank looks good on the Mac and can handle investment transactions. But that he's also realistic about Intuit's capability to do so, which after talking to him I'd say is not that good. I get the impression that Forth fully understands the importance for users, and potential profitability for Intuit, to bringing out a grown-up financial app on OS X. 'There's a huge market here,' Forth says. 'Decisions that have been made in the past about.Mac desktop OSes have been rooted in the past.' Meanwhile, the Mac is winning a bigger share of the future.

#Quicken essentials for mac vs ibank full#

So will Intuit breathe new life into Quicken Essentials, and bring full financial features back to Mac users? 'We're looking really hard at it,' Forth says, not committing to a future and then taking another swipe at his predecessors. Forth adds, 'The legacy of Quicken on the Mac isn't particularly proud.' Even with Quicken Essentials, which was supposed to take up the Mac torch for Intuit, he says, 'the commitment has gone slower that it should have.' Neither Quicken Essentials nor offer bill-pay options or robust investment tracking.

#Quicken essentials for mac vs ibank upgrade#

For reasons I'm not clear about-I came to Intuit recently, with the Mint acquisition-it didn't reach feature parity.' (Mint's original CEO, Aaron Patzer, took over the personal finance division at Inuit after the acquisition, but he's now 'VP of product innovation.')ДЇor Mac users who need Quicken 2007-level features, Forth says, 'I'll be the first to tell you the options are not great.' He enumerates three main options: 1) Don't upgrade your Mac to Lion, 2) 'Upgrade' to Quicken Essentials, and 3) Try. 'Intuit saw this coming,' Forth said of Apple's withdrawal of PowerPC support, 'and that's why we started to build Quicken Essentials. Instead, the re-write of Quicken became a separate product line, unambitiously named Quicken Essentials, which lacked support for investments and for online bill payment. Intuit's new (six weeks on the job) general manager of personal finance, Aaron Forth, told me last week that the app was supposed to ship with Quicken 2007 feature parity and then replace the older product, but Intuit couldn't get it all done in time for release. So Intuit wrote a new version of Quicken, using the modern Apple frameworks, Objective-C and Cocoa.

#Quicken essentials for mac vs ibank code#

And there were issues in the creaky old Mac Quicken code base anyway. Intuit did know that relying on Rosetta was not a long-term strategy. Quicken Essentials is Quicken for children. Whether or not Intuit will ever do right by Mac users, though, is still an open question. It's not quite that simple, of course, and there is finally new leadership at the company that is at least acknowledging the situation. It appears that Intuit simply chose to neglect a portion of its customer base. The light at the end of the tunnel was a 10-million watt Klieg light on a big, loud train. How did Intuit end up screwing over loyal Mac Quicken users so thoroughly? We can take swipes at Apple for prematurely ceasing support of the Rosetta technology that supported PowerPC apps, but Intuit, along with every other Mac developer, saw the end looming for old PPC apps.

What's worse, if you upgrade to Lion, you won't be able to extricate your data from Quicken at all, as no other app can read its proprietary format. It's the most infamous of the applications that have been left behind by the latest version of the Mac operating system, which no longer runs apps written for the PowerPC architecture, as Quicken 2007 was.

And if you upgraded to OS X Lion, Quicken 2007 will no longer work on your Mac. There's Quicken 2007 for the Mac, but nothing serious after that. If you're on a Mac, though, you might think Intuit has abandoned you. If you have a grown-up financial life, with money in investment vehicles, Intuit has an up-to-date version of Quicken to help you keep track of it all-on Windows.