I’ve been using Quicken on the Mac since 1994, which happens to be the point in time where I decided that controlling my personal finances was fundamentally important. I am a die-hard Quicken user. What I do to get any Windows software there, is I copy the download file onto my Mac desktop, right click and copy, and then paste into Windows Explorer in the virtual machine.Right away, you should know something about me. After the virtual machine is loaded, you just go to the Windows 10 icon in the Mac taskbar and load Quicken into the virtual machine.Last year, he bought an iMac and realized that he couldn’t use the Quicken program that housed years of his personal data. Mike is a stay-at-home dad who does all his at-home finances using Quicken. Explains how he started using Parallels Desktop.
Quicken On Parallels Mac OS X 10Apples operating systems, from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to macOS 11 Big Sur.Problem: Mac OS X Lion (10.7) is imminentIt links to this blog post on the Intuit site. Intel Mac to run Windows using Apples Boot Camp or Parallels Desktop. However, since I love the Mac, and I love Quicken, I’m desperately looking for a way out of this problem. Intuit has really backed themselves into a corner, and not surprisingly, Apple has no interest in bailing them out. 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. It’s a great new application written from the ground up. You can switch to Quicken Essentials for Mac. Unfortunately, Mint is basically blind to anything it can’t integrate with online. For me, Mint is something I use in addition to Quicken. 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. I’m not sure how many people are actually affected. You will need to either re-download your investment transactions or manually enter them.”This is an epic disaster. By the way, to add insult to injury: “You can easily convert your Quicken Mac data with the exception of Investment transaction history. Switch to Windows? Intuit would get a better response here if they just sent Mac users a picture of a huge middle finger. Seriously? 1999 called and they want their advice back. You can switch to Quicken for Windows. 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. 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. Fast forward to June 2011, and Apple announces that their latest operating system, Mac OS X Lion, will not support the backwards compatibility software to allow PowerPC applications to run on Intel Macs.With all due respect to my good friends at Intuit, this problem is really Intuit’s fault. 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. But in the end, they called several plays wrong, and now they are vulnerable.Intuit would argue that Apple could still ship Rosetta on Mac OS X Lion. 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. Apple has announced that Mac OS X Lion will include a change to the terms of service to allow for virtualization. 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). In fact, Apple’s install disks for Mac OS X have been built this way. Many 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. Adobe premiere elements 11 mac os xThey are changing the virtualization terms for Mac OS X Lion, so why not change them for Snow Leopard to0.I’m a daily VMware Fusion user, which is how I use both Windows & Mac operating systems on my MacBook Pro. 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. Anyone who thinks they are not up to speed hasn’t been paying attention over the past couple of years. 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. 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. 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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