Intuit announced on Thursday that the company will (finally) be bringing Quicken to Apple’s Mac OS X Lion operation system. The company said it will be releasing “Lion Compatible Quicken for Mac 2007” sometime this spring.
As the name suggests, this is a version of Quicken based on the four year old Quicken 2007, but getting Quicken on Lion at all is a major step forward for Mac users. As Intuit explained to The Mac Observer in June, Quicken’s code base was built entirely around the PowerPC processor.
While Apple moved to Intel’s processors several years ago, the company included a technology called Rosetta that provided for legacy support of PowerPC code on Intel Macs. That allowed products like Quicken to run on Intel Macs.
The problem is that OS X 10.7, or Lion, which was released in July, specifically dropped Rosetta—that meant no more Quicken until and if Intuit could develop it anew for Lion. In June, the company said that the engine that runs Quicken and the database underneath the software was old enough that it felt that moving it to Lion wasn’t going to be possible.
Instead, Intuit said that it would require an entire new engine, and in the meanwhile, the company released Quicken Essentials for Mac, a “lite” version of Quickens that left many feeling that Intuit had fallen short of taking care of its Mac customers. Today’s news suggests that Intuit wanted to rectify the situation.
“As you may know,” Aaron Forth, General Manager of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group, told customers on Thursday, “Quicken for Mac 2007 does not currently work on Apple’s latest operating system, Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). I understand the frustration this may have caused you and have put a team in place to address this issue. I am happy to announce that we will have a solution that makes Quicken 2007 for Mac ‘Lion-compatible’ by early spring.”
The company also posted a FAQ that explains users will be able to migrate their data file from Quicken 2005, 2006 or 2007 for Mac (on Macs still running Snow Leopard or an earlier version of Mac OS X) to Lion Compatible Quicken for Mac 2007. The same is true for users who already migrated their Quicken data to Quicken Essentials.
[Updated at 3:21 PM with details and additional information. - Editor]