Called tech support for Intuit's other program - Quickbooks. Talk about hard sell for the Windows version. One tech rep went so far as to say that he doubted that the company would continue to support the Mac in the future! Wonder what the politics are? Can't imagine that four different tech reps would all do the windows hard sell.

Oh man, don't even get me started. Another review of Quicken for Mac. Here's my review: It's one total piece of censored. I emailed Intuit's CEO and he replied personally saying they are "taking a hard look at what to do with the future of the Quicken for Mac product". They don't care one bit about the Mac platform. Their support and their product is a total disgrace! Apple should force Bill Campbell to step down from Apple's board, unless of course Intuit really has a change of heart and seriously changes their ways.

I'd be more worried about the OS9-ish UI and the bugs in the product. It sometimes mysteriously drops downloaded transactions and I have to manually compare the register to my bank account log to see what transactions have to be manually entered....a big pain. I also have issues copy and pasting text into the register.

I'm not inclined to upgrade unless the product is brought into the 21st century and the annoying bugs are fixed.

I have been looking at other apps but none of them offer the ability to directly download my transactions from my bank...and I want that.

to the guy complaining about UB support increasing file sizes....

if the few extra MB used for larger executables bothers you, you can use a command line tool called 'lipo' to extract the PPC binary from the file and then dump the UB file.

If intuit is debating making Quicken UB, I can assure you that executable file size isn't an issue in the debate. The project is likely a carbon app heavily tied to Codewarrior and significant effort is required to move it over to xcode. They have to decide if they want to pay an engineer to spend a few months getting the thing to work with xcode.


-James

I started with Quicken on Windows years and years ago when I had a PC. I then got a Mac and switched over to Quicken on Mac. And I kept shelling out money for 'upgrades' that hardly added any features. Recently they've been offering Mac OS X features, like iCal support, or Dashboard Widget. Big censored big time whoop! I can't download information from my financial institutions (while the Windows version can) and I should be happy that I can use a widget to enter my data??? Isn't that kinda like giving me a 12 year old blind dog and then expecting me to be happy because I have a pet now?

The PC version of their app is so much better that I bit the bullet and have been running Quicken via VirtualPC for a couple years now. Sure, its very pokey (on my dual G5), but at least I gained all kinds of features with it that I didn't have with the Mac version, and now that I've got an Intel box running Parallels Desktop, there is just no going back.

If Intuit someday makes a version for the Mac with feature parity to the Windows version, and I can just copy my data file over to the Mac and not lose any information, I'll gladly go back.

I would have switched to Money, as at least Microsoft has made no hint at offering a poor second cousin on the Mac as a token to Mac users, but doing a data conversion of my Quicken data didn't work so well.

-d

While the widget for Quicken data entry is nice, in typical Intuit fashion they botched the implementation: You can create as many widgets as you like so that you can enter transactions into different accounts. However, the widgets forget which account they are associated with whenever the Mac is re-started. The result being that you end up with a set of uninitialized widgets, requiring you to repeat the task of choosing which accounts you want access to all over again.

Intuit has long treated the Mac version of Quicken as an orphan. The product only recently (2006?) supported 401(k) accounts, which is unbelievable! Although I agree the lack of universal binary support at this time appears to be an abject failure of the product management role within Quicken, I am not terribly bothered as the product will run fine with rosetta.

What is more absurd is the longstanding file incompatibility with the Windows product. With the growth in unit sales by Apple, this has to frustrate a lot of users migrating from Win to Mac. Check out the Quicken support and it will confirm data will be lost in the migration. My data file is nearly 16MB and growing. To avoid the aggravation of manually migrating the data on enduring data loss, I am using the penalty box known as Virtual PC -- dog slow on a dual-G5 PowerMac -- but at least it works.

Once OS X 10.5 ships in 2007, I will contemplate an upgrade to the Intel-based Mac and use Parallels to recover application performance without data file issues. Thanks to Intuit's shortsightedness in developing the Quicken-Mac product, I can solve their errors by merely spending lots of my money.

As for the complaints about lack of feature growth from prior version, well what more do you want or need? I have used the same version (Quicken/Win 2003) for almost three years. I upgraded to 2006 only when the product was EOL'd and I could no longer automatically update my portfolios. I have never been a proponent of feature creep in the product. The Basic version has worked fine for me and I actually prefer the stable UI (no need to learn or uncover changes to menus and features sets -- even if it is the Windows version running in Virtual PC).