John Siracusa
Attention users of Quicken for Mac who are switching to Lion
July 20, 2011: 11:34 AM ETDon't buy Apple's new operating system until you find a new home for your financial data
Apple doesn't tell you this, so we will.
With OS X Lion, the new operating system for Macs released Wednesday, Apple (AAPL) has just cut a significant tie to its past -- namely legacy programs like Intuit's (INTU) Quicken that were written for the old PowerPC.
As John Siracusa points out in his definitive and thoroughly entertaining Ars Technica review:
"Though this is the second version of Mac OS X that doesn't support PowerPC processors, this is the first version that won't run PowerPC applications. In Snow Leopard, the Rosetta translation engine allowed PowerPC applications to run, and run well, often faster than they ran on the (admittedly older) PowerPC Macs for which they were developed. Lion no longer includes Rosetta, even as an optional install. (link)
What this means is that once you upgrade to Lion, any applications that haven't been re-written for the Intel (INTC) architecture will stop working.
For many programs, this is an inconvenience easily rectified by buying the new version. For Quicken, it's a potential disaster.
Nowhere in Apple's press release or on its (currently nonexistent) OS X Lion support page does it warn Quicken users or tell them how to prepare for the upgrade. [UPDATE: The Lion support site is now live, but its section on incompatible software does not mention PowerPC or Rosetta. Nor does it warn users that they might lose irreplaceable data when they install Lion.]
If you have financial data you want to preserve, we strongly suggest that before switching to Lion you back up your hard drive and transfer your Quicken files to one of the many new financial planning programs that can read them. See Exit Quicken, pursued by a Lion for some suggestions. Some are free. None are perfect.
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Exit Quicken, pursued by a Lion
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My first three entries in Quicken, dated Sept. 8, 1997, were a $17.31 payment to Bell Atlantic (remember them?) marked "Philip's modem" (remember those?) and $15 for my annual subscription to the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link in Sausalito, Calif., which for many years was my only conduit onto the Internet.
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Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jul 8, 2011 12:25 PM ETPosted in: Apple, Hypercritical, iBank, Intel, Intuit, John Siracusa, Lion, Mac OS, Macintosh, Mint, PCs, PowerPC, Quicken, Quicken Essentials, Snow Leopard, software, Windows 3.0 -
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In the middle of a live broadcast discussing Twitter's new president, Google's (GOOG) Android market share and why Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Phone 7 is a terrible name for an operating system, the guest pauses to ask his co-host: "Speaking of well-hung Wookies, does this show have a sponsor?"
The guest is Daring Fireball's John Gruber, dean of MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 15, 2011 6:16 AM ETPosted in: 5by5, Apple, Dan Benjamin, Daring Fireball, Google, iPhone, John Gruber, John Siracusa, Leo Laporte, Marco Arment, Merlin Mann, Netcasts, Podcasts, radio, TWiT -
Tablet: Big iPhone or thin MacBook?
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Two lines of thought dominated the ongoing debate this week about what Apple's (AAPL) tablet computer is and what it might be good for.
[UPDATE: Make that three lines of thought. See Antacid Tablet, below.]
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Leopard: The Definitive Review
Most consumers thinking about buying Apple's (AAPL) new Leopard operating system will learn what they need to know from the first wave of reviews -- the ones written by journalists who were given pre-loaded, pre-release copies of OS X 10.5 and had a week to play with it.
But the review that programmers were waiting for was the one by fellow developer John Siracusa, the Ars Technica columnist who wrote the MORE
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