Ya Gotta Wonder What Intuit Was Thinking

Update: What precipitated this whole post was my failure to find any way to get a portfolio summary out of Quicken Essentials. After reading the article I linked to below I went and downloaded the trial of iBank, exported a QIF from Quicken 2007, and imported it into iBank. Not only did the import go smoothly but, imagine that, they have a canned report called "Portfolio Summary"! So now I'm going to give iBank a try; I suspect that I'll be asking for my money back from Inuit before too awful long.

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I recently retired my 2003-vintage, PowerPC-based iMac for one of the sparkly, new, Intel-based ones. Which also meant upgrading various bits of software including, of necessity, Quicken. Big mistake...

Intuit's latest offering for Mac, Quicken Essentials, is a braindead piece of crap. I thought I could deal with the lack of investment-tracking support, but they've gone and removed a bunch of other, subtle stuff as well. The product as it currently stands is only slightly better than a toy.

Now, here's the puzzling thing: It's not like Intuit isn't capable of producing good personal finance software for OS X; I've been happily using Quickbooks 2007 for a number of years now. They've just decided, for no discernable reason, to limit Mac users to this dumbed-down version of their software. If you want decent features they suggest that you should buy the Windows version instead. Hey, Intuit... I'm not going to switch platforms just for your lousy software. If it gets unbearable I'll just switch to iBank instead of sending you any more of my money.