Should I Buy a Mac? | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Post edited 2:16 pm – August 28, 2012 by KyleAAA

Money Counselor said:

I've been Mac for 4+ years and will never go back. After Intuit screwed Mac users when Lion came out and many Quicken users–like me–found out the hard way that the latest version of Quicken of Mac would not work with Lion 

Ha! Well to be fair, it was Apple''s fault, not Intuit''s. Apple switched from PowerPC architecture to Intel back in 2006.That was fine because Apple had created a PowerPC emulator called Rosetta to run old PowerPC applications during the transition. Apple, in its infinite wisdom, decided to unilaterally drop Rosetta from Lion. This would have been fine if they'd given sufficient notice for application developers to make the switch, but they didn't. Developers didn't even get a preview of the new OS until March of 2011 (it went live in July). Even then, Inuit potentially didn't know about the incompatibility until just before Lion launched because Apple is famously known for providing poor documentation for releases. It would have been impossible for Inuit to know before March 2011, though.

There's no way Intuit could have ported the existing functionality over in time for launch with the short lead time they had. Even if Quicken had released an update in 2008, 2009, and 2010 it wouldn't have mattered. It still wouldn't have worked with Lion because Apple decided to pull the rug out from under them without giving any notice. To be honest, a 9 month turn-around for a port of a program that complicated to an entirely new platform is impressive. I've spend over a month before doing a port from Windows XP to Windows 7, which is far less work.

In reality, Apple screwed over both Intuit and its own users. They should have told everybody well in advance they were going to switch off Rosetta once and for all. They had 5 years to do it. At worst, they could have warned users at upgrade that they had programs that wouldn't run after the update. It would have been easy for them to do. Complain all you want, but complain about Apple and the way they do business.