Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Quicken on the Mac - What is up, Jack?

Intuit has fallen far, far behind on the Macintosh.

The latest version of Quicken available for the Macintosh came out around August 2006. It is supplied as a PowerPC binary. This can only run on an Intel-based Mac under the Rosetta PowerPC emulator, or natively on a PowerPC-based Mac.

The problem is that Apple stopped making PowerPC-based Macs over a year ago. In fact, I think they stopped making them a month before Quicken shipped its latest Mac version in mid-2006.

It is really late that Intuit has not come out with an Intel-based or Universal Binary (dual PowerPC/Intel binary) version of Quicken by now.

Apple announced the upcoming switch to Intel in May 2005 - over two years ago. The day of the announcement, they released a new version of their free programming tools that worked the same way as their old one and added the ability to generate Intel-only binaries or UB ones that worked natively on both PowerPC and Intel based Macs.

Apple shipped their first Intel-baesd Macs in January 2006. The last PowerPC Macs shipped in July 2006, if I am not mistaken. Apple products have been non-PowerPC since that month.

So the latest version of Quicken for the Mac was an anachronism the day it shipped.

Now, over a year later - it seems even lamer.

Apple is not going to support PowerPC binaries with Rosetta forever. Those emulators are not uncommon in our industry but they are certainly not something you can count on to be included for a long time. They also chew up some resources. So programs running under it take up more memory and also run slower.

I called Intuit a week or two ago to find out when an Intel version of Quicken would be shipping - if ever.

I did not get an answer to that question. Nor did I find out if they were dropping the Mac as they have done in the past. What I was told is that Apple is about to release Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) very soon. Intuit will probably make an announcement after that, I was told.

I had the impression that their announcement would be soon after 10.5 ships. Apple said it would ship this Fall, in October I think.

Personally, I am not planning to buy the version of Intuit that was written for the last generation of Macs. However, I have given up on Quicken until Intuit makes their announcement.

Spreadsheets are more work than Quicken to update but that is what I plan to use until they update for current Macintosh's.

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posted by John Collins @ 10:05 AM

1 Comments:

At 9:02 AM, Blogger John Collins said...

Intuit had told me that they would be making an announcement about Quicken for the Macintosh when Leopard version of OS X came out.

Leopard release date was announced, product went on sale, and has been selling for more than a week now.

But I found no new information - for better or for worse, on Intuit web site. Just one exception. They say Quicken 2007 (a very old PowerPC binary) runs on Leopard.

 

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