On Q Mac, Do not prompt to update if device is running a macOS that is no longer supported [Edited]

dandeliondigital

Hello,

Twice I have been "burned" by the Quicken Classic for Macintosh update install which at this time will allow a user to update their program to a version that is not officially supported. The rule is that Quicken supports the last 3 macOS systems.

Who actually follows what macOS they are on and knows when the great Apple has obsoleted their computer in the eyes of Quicken? NOT ME.

After over 40 years of upgrades, almost 17 years with INTUIT, I happen to believe that Quicken knows what macOS my computer has installed. Why does your updater allow an installation when the upgraded program is no longer supported by your rules for macOS compatibility, resulting in breaking all lot of "update glass," so to speak, and creating work and frustrating support calls for the end user.

You should notify users first, and prevent updating on an "obsoleted by you" Macintosh. I would also recommend that you have a 3 month advance warming shot to notify users to anticipate getting a newer computer because the wonderful upgrade cycle is creeping up on them.

You know you can do this, and why not give it a try?

In the very least you should provide for the user, on the update window, a link to your system requirement page, which should show a pending requirement WARNING "WILL ROBINSON!!" - YOUR macOS IS ABOUT TO BECOME OBSOLETE!!!!

How about a little respect for the end user who really just wants to get the money ducks in a row, and not waste their time trying to fix what you have broken.

Less "feature-itis" and more productivity. You can do it. PLEASE.

Thanks, and so long for now, Tom

Chris_QPW

If they do this, they should certainly make it optional, not a blocking based on the operating system version.

Why?

Because in fact the "required version" is more like the "We aren't going to support it, but it might or might not work".

There are definitely people that have "pushed the limit" on this and found it to work.

dandeliondigital

Yes.

I have done that, ""pushed the limit" without even knowing I was doing it.

Then when things went "south," the IT "make work" fun begins.

I wasn't trying to push anything, just do my work.

I want stability, but they want to "move the cheese".

So long for now, Tom

jacobs

Who actually follows what macOS they are on and knows when the great Apple has obsoleted their computer in the eyes of Quicken? NOT ME.

I think every computer user needs to be aware of what version of macOS they are running before installing any significant software updates which may be incompatible, whether updates to macOS or key third-party software. While I understand your desire for advance warning, I think users also shoulder some of the responsibility responsibility for being aware of whether a new macOS upgrade is compatible with their Mac hardware, and for being aware of of whether third-party software is compatible with their version of macOS.

In terms of Quicken, the Mac development team has always indicated in the Release Notes when they are releasing a new version which is not compatible with older Mac operating systems. And in the 10-year history of modern Quicken Mac, they have always supported operating systems going back farther in time than the "official" Quicken policy of current plus two prior operating systems. (If you contact Quicken Support, the representative you speak with may simply consult the official policy and not inform you, or even know, that a prior version will still work fine.)

By the official policy, Quicken Mac officially currently supports macOS 14 (Sonoma) and the two prior operating systems, macOS 13 (Ventura) and macOS 12 (Monterey). But the Quicken Mac development team has not yet ended support for the operating system before that, macOS 11 (Big Sur). Operating systems prior to macOS 11 are no longer supported, as has been documented in the Release Notes…

Most recently, in November 2023 when Quicken Mac 7.4 was released, the Release Notes stated:

Future macOS requirements
ANNOUNCEMENT - 7.4 is the last release with support for macOS 10.15.

So that means Quicken Mac version 7.5 and beyond does not run on macOS 10.15 (Catalina) or earlier.

Previously, in April 2023, when version 7.0 was released, the Release Notes stated:

System requirements

UPDATED - Quicken v7.0 requires macOS 10.15 (Catalina) or higher

So version Quicken Mac version 7.0 and beyond does not run on macOS 10.14 (Mojave) or earlier.

This change was communicated to users in advance in February 2023, when the Release Notes for version 6.12 stated:

Announcement
ANNOUNCEMENT - 6.12 is the last release with support for macOS 10.13 and 10.14

So your request for Quicken to notify users in advance they that are approaching the end of the line for Quicken upgrades on an older mac operating system has actually been happening as each older operating system is retired.

If you still have an operating system older than required for a new Quicken Mac version, as long as you maintain a Quicken subscription, you can continue to run your older version of Quicken without accepting an upgrade. You can always re-download an older version of Quicken Mac and revert to the backup made just prior to an update if you install an update and find it will not work. However, it sometimes (but not always) happens that changes to server-based systems will result in transaction downloads ceasing to work if you're running an older version of Quicken.

dandeliondigital

Hello,

First let me say thank you for your detailed response to my problem.

I actually do follow the macOS, mostly to find out what I need to turn off to make the machine run better.

I am sorry to say that in my expriences with Quicken for Macintosh, that what you say is not totally true. Namely, I have ran into IT problems, and have been told by Quicken support, not once, but three times that I would need to upgrade the macOS, and each time this required getting a newer machine to run the new OS, and in the case of the last go round of problems, this occurred much sooner than I had planned. I was planning for the need for a new computer next April-ish, but no….

In the last, most recent case, I was functioning well up until the end of last March, and then a monthly "update" broke things, and I was told by Quicken tech support that I would need to upgrade from Big Sur macOS11 to macOS12, Monterey, requiring yet another newer computer to run the software, and if you go back and read what you wrote, you will see that this was not supposed to be necessary. Even after doing what I was told to do, I suffered with issues requiring a multitude of calls to both financial institutions and to Quicken for help and support (what a time expense), and it was not Quicken (the breaker of my systems and software), but a very hard to contact tech support person from each financial institutions that finally (what torture) helped sort things. There are not a lot of knowledgable tech support people in my experience. Some do not even know how to position the mic on their headset, IMO. YMMV.

My experience is that not updating will also lead you down the path to failure and trouble. I cringe every time I load the program and am encouraged to update. It's like computer PTSD! I am reading about the latest macOS coming out soon, and I am waiting for Quicken to force me into buying yet a newer computer simply to be able to download financial data.

I hear everyone touting AI and how all this intelligence is going to be a great boon. Quicken makes it very difficult to find simple information that the end end user needs to know to keep going. Make this convenient. Better yet have the computer solve this ongoing change issue, please. Computers should take the burden off the end user. AI or not, they are capable of that. Software updates for decades have checked the system, and prevented instalations.

Maybe it's just my bad luck or my poor choice(s) in the financial institution(s) that I use, but I can tell you it is not something you ever want to go through again, that is, reconnecting accounts and waiting months for failed connections to finally work again because you did the update. In other words, I have trusted Intuit, and they have failed me. Quicken tech support has failed me. Let the machine unburden the end user in a plain and simple "insanely great" way, and maybe we can get some work done for a change.

Meanwhile, I will be combing the "release notes" and following the ever changing world of computer hardware and software.

So long for now, Tom

jacobs

In the last, most recent case, I was functioning well up until the end of last March, and then a monthly "update" broke things, and I was told by Quicken tech support that I would need to upgrade from Big Sur macOS11 to macOS12, Monterey, requiring yet another newer computer to run the software, and if you go back and read what you wrote, you will see that this was not supposed to be necessary.

Yes, and I also wrote that not all Quicken Support representatives know about the gray area between what is officially supported by policy versus what is supported by the Mac development team. Or even if they know, when confronted with someone with a technical problem, they follow standard procedure of telling the customer to upgrade to an officially supported operating system. The software requirements I posted above come directly from the development team, and I believe them to be accurate. I have had older Macs I use for testing which have happily run Quicken on operating systems older than current + last two. In fact, my main desktop iMac was still running maxOS 10.15 (Catalina) until earlier this year, because I was holding onto using some old versions of Adobe software which was too expensive to upgrade to the current subscription versions — and I had no problems with Quicken up through version 7.4 running on Catalina, even though that was past the policy expiration date.

Even after doing what I was told to do, I suffered with issues requiring a multitude of calls to both financial institutions and to Quicken for help and support… 

… which supports that you probably could have remained on an older operating system, because the problem was not a need to update from Big Sur to Monterey. Unless perhaps your problems had to do with back-end connectivity issues with your specific financial institutions mandated by them requiring a newer Mac operating system for security purposes. (For instance, unrelated to Quicken, when I was still running macOS Catalina, there were some financial websites I could not log into in Safari, because they wanted a newer operating system with the latest security patches.)

In other words, I have trusted Intuit, and they have failed me. Quicken tech support has failed me. Let the machine unburden the end user in a plain and simple "insanely great" way, and maybe we can get some work done for a change.

There are two things which can derail users of Quicken desktop products. One is operating system compatibility and bugs in the program code. The other is connectivity problems with any of thousands of financial institutions. They are truly separate problems, although to the end user, they may merge into "Quicken isn't working for me." In my experience over the past 10 years of "modern" Quicken Mac, bugs in the Quicken Mac code itself are much more infrequent, and major problems are usually fixed very quickly by the Mac development team.

But for connectivity problems, the sad reality is that connectivity to financial institutions is accomplished with imperfect sets of different systems, any of which can be broken by minor or major changes by any financial institution. At any given time, there are likely several hundred (of more than 10,0000) financial institutions having partial or complete connectivity problems. Quicken is largely at the mercy of Intuit, who still handles connectivity for Quicken under contract. Customers cannot contact Intuit's connectivity team directly, and there is almost never any information fed back to frustrated users from Intuit through Quicken to share what the problem is, who is responsible for a fix, and when it is expected. So users (not-unreasonably) blame Quicken, although Quicken is largely powerless to get the problems resolved any faster than Intuit and the actual financial institution get around to getting a fix in place.

dandeliondigital

Hi Jacobs,

The importsnt issue is not being addressed - because when Quicken wants you to upgrade - you have to stop what you are doing, and make an expedition to be sure the new update is no going to break what is working because of system caompatibility. Losts of the breakage will be unknown untit you "connect". Not the correct way to treat the user, IMO.

I think I read that macOS Sonoma is the next major release, and who knows when that will happen, but it will be too soon IMO. Who knows how much glass that will break for end users?

The creators and developers are not thinking or caring about the end users, or ease of use. I need to gmy work done first.

So please let the computer discover what macOS is I use and then allow or warn me to update or not to update! Then have a grace period of say 3 months for me to adjust my hardware to fit the software. They have to fit to be free of trouble, and I want to avoid trouble.

Don't get me started on "security issues". I have spent over 18 month frustrated by my ISP breaking the e-mail and forcing updates in a manner similar to Quicken, but at least they gave me a warning, the first time, a year in advance, but then after that was working, they changed it yet again, and left a pile of broken glass with more changes, and they do not communicate well at all, and they, sad to say, have a lot of phishing experts sending the users malcious e-mail every week. What fun!

The incorrect choices are being made IMO, and the end user "gets it in the end". I wish I could say different.

So long for now, Tom

jacobs

@dandeliondigital

I do remember that when I was running macOS Mojave (10.14) on one of my Macs, when Quicken Mac version 7.0 was released, it did exactly what you're wanting it to do. It told me there was a new update available, but when I clicked on it, it did not download the new update; it instead told me the new version required macOS Catalina (10.15) or later. I haven't been "behind the curve" since then, so I don't know if that was a one-time thing for that release, or something they normally do.

I think I read that macOS Sonoma is the next major release, and who knows when that will happen, but it will be too soon IMO.

Actually, Sonoma (macOS 14) is the current release; it came out last fall. Next up from Apple is Sequoia (macOS 15) this fall. Apple has released a new versions of macOS every fall for the past 13 consecutive years, so this is nothing new.

Quicken officially support the current and most recent two operating systems: so currently, Sonoma, Ventura and Monterey. But the day Sequoia is release in September, it won't suddenly break Quicken running on Monterey. When Quicken 7.5 was released this January, that ended support for macOS Catalina. It still runs on Big Sur (macOS 11), even though that is older than the officially-supported current-plus-past-two. Each time the Quicken Mac development team has retired compatibility with an older operating system, they have announced it one release prior to the change taking effect (typically about two months in advance). So far, there's been no notice about ending compatibility with Big Sur, but it's likely to happen in the not-too-distant future. It really depends on whether any of the underlying programming tools and libraries used by Quicken are broken by a macOS update. For better or worse, Apple is pretty aggressive about getting developers to update their code to keep up with the latest enhancements in macOS.

I understand your desire for Quicken to warn you or block you from installing an upgrade which won't work. They've done so in the past, but perhaps not every time. My advice is to glance at the release notes each time there's a new update; they will contain an advance warning if Quicken will be ending support for a version of macOS with the subsequent release.

Chris_QPW

I'm going to add to my original comment about it being optional, and why I believe that, and why even a warning isn't really going to be "accurate".

First let me state what they do on Quicken Windows. Once, Microsoft drops support for a version of Windows, they drop support for it too in Quicken Windows, and they block using Quicken Windows on that version of Windows (no option, total block). But I do believe that Microsoft's complete drop of a version is longer than say 3 versions of MacOS.

This is in fact, a policy, not really a statement about what is and what isn't compatible. The truth is short of the fact that Windows does something like stop downloading security updates/certificates, it is next to impossible to actually determine when a program like Quicken will actually not work with the new operating system version. With the exception of major changes this is true of the MacOS too. Breaking changes were the changing of the old libraries/machine support and dropping 32-bit, but that is a long time in between.

"Dropping support" really has to do with restricting their "workload" more than anything else. Every version they have officially support requires someone to check that it works, and if not someone to fix it, and also support people have to be aware of the differences.

And I want to come back to your original statement:

Twice I have been "burned" by the Quicken Classic for Macintosh update install which at this time will allow a user to update their program to a version that is not officially supported. 

I believe that this statement is actually incorrect, not that you weren't burned, but that it what caused the problem was the given version of Quicken Mac was incompatible with the MacOS version that you were running.

I have little doubt that unless you are talking about the 32-bit to 64-bit change years ago, that a person could install the latest version of Quicken Mac on the first 64-bit only version of MacOS and run fine, or at least 99.99% of it working. Even in major operating system updates neither Microsoft nor Apple "gut the system" and start over. And they have a mindset to try to maintain compatibility when they can. Too many people depend on that compatibility, including Microsoft and Apple themselves.

EDIT: In a nutshell I don't believe making this change would have prevented the problems you encountered, and if not optional would prevent others from using Quicken Mac a bit longer if they aren't able to update their operating system for some reason.

jacobs

@Chris_QPW Sorry, but I'll disagree on most of your points.

First the Mac development team acts differently with regard to OS upgrades than the Quicken windows team. That's largely because Apple does an OS update every year, and Microsoft does not. As I have detailed above, while the "official" party line from Quicken for both Mac and Windows is current OS plus the two most recent, the Quicken Mac team has always (in the decade since modern Quicken Mac has existed) actually allowed Quicken to run — and extended support efforts to fix glitches — with older operating systems than the official current-plus-two.

Second, the Quicken Mac team sometime introduces new feature which require a newer operating system, but still supports Quicken without such features on older operating systems. For instance, when they release the Business & Personal functionality last November, they labeled it this way: "Built for macOS 12+, requires macOS 11 or later".

Whereas when they drop the ability to operate at all on an older OS, they account it like this: "Future macOS requirements: 7.4 is the last release with support for macOS 10.15."

You said: I don't believe making this change would have prevented the problems you encountered." I am surmising that whatever problems Larry encountered occurred when he upgraded to version 7.5 while still running macOS 10.15, and he's saying Quicken Mac didn't block him from installing it even though it could have and possibly should have. (I don't know the details of the problems he encountered, and it's not worth delving into; it's possible something other than the new version on an older OS was responsible for whatever problems he had. Quicken Support will always fall back on the official policy on supported operating systems, but that doesn't always tell there whole story.) The Quicken Mac team did create such a block when support for macOS 10.14 (the last to support 32-bit code) was dropped. I can't verify whether or not they did have a block for this particular upgrade. If they didn't, they could have. In the prior case, it told users that they needed a newer macOS to upgrade to the latest version of Quicken, but they could continue happily using their current version if they couldn't or didn't want to upgrade their OS.

Finally, Tom says "I have been 'burned' by the Quicken Classic for Macintosh update install which at this time will allow a user to update their program to a version that is not officially supported." The word "officially" there is important. Are we talking about the "official" Quicken policy of current-plus-2-older operating systems? Or the Mac development team's lack of canceling compatibility with older operating systems. Does "official support" refer to what Quicken Support representatives are trained to do with meeting the "official" policy, or does "official support" refer to announcements from the Mac development team. There are lots of possibilities in that area between "official support" (company policy) and "will still run okay as best we are aware" (development team). There have generally not been a lot of problems in that gray area over the years, and the developers have frequently tracked down and fixed bugs in the current version running on older operating systems.

In the end, I come back to something I said at the start of this thread: I believe users should be aware of what operating system they're running and what the software vendor states about minimum required operating system. When a user knows they are pushing the envelope, I think it falls on the user to tread cautiously, by not upgrading right away, waiting to see if there are any bug-fix releases or reports of problems on an older OS, and making backups such that they can easily roll back if they run into problems. Even if the developers are willing to expend time and effort to fix bugs which surface when running on an older OS, that doesn't mean they have necessarily tested the oldest OS aggressively as they do on the officially supported operating systems.

In any case, may I suggest we end this discussion here? Tom made a feature request, which any user is entitled to do. If enough other users add their votes over time in support of such a feature, it will get pushed to the developers for consideration; if not many users add their votes over time, then the Idea will eventually be archived out of existence.

 

Chris_QPW

@jacobs You know MacOS and what the MacOS developers do much better than I do, so I won't argue your points, but I just want to point out why I believe that even when the developers state "requires version XXX" it is most likely a "guess" not something that is tested.

Say Apple introduces a feature that isn't supported on the last version of MacOS and the Mac developers decide that they need to use that feature going forward. If all they do is put in that change, then they will have violated the promise to be compatible with the last two versions. They have to put in code that detects the version and do something different. If they put in something that is restricted to just one version back that is pretty poor programming. The more likely is they would put in "if lower than this version (the current one)" do something different. If they have done that, then most likely the version before that will work too. And they will have tested for that to keep the promise of two versions supported.

But the only way they will "know" that the version before that works or not is by testing it. This would mean that they would have to test versions back until it fails to really know where it actually fails. I don't believe they will do that.

So, like I said on the first post, I believe that anything they do should have the possibility to be overridden.

jacobs

Say Apple introduces a feature that isn't supported on the last version of MacOS and the Mac developers decide that they need to use that feature going forward. If all they do is put in that change, then they will have violated the promise to be compatible with the last two versions. They have to put in code that detects the version and do something different. If they put in something that is restricted to just one version back that is pretty poor programming. The more likely is they would put in "if lower than this version (the current one)" do something different. If they have done that, then most likely the version before that will work too. And they will have tested for that to keep the promise of two versions supported.

The Mac development team does this. There are sometimes new features which require a particular operating system, and those features simply do not appear when the user is using an older operating system which they still support. These situations are noted in the Release Notes and the "What's New" screen which pops up after an update.

But the only way they will "know" that the version before that works or not is by testing it. This would mean that they would have to test versions back until it fails to really know where it actually fails. I don't believe they will do that.

And as I've said, the Mac team does do this. Currently Quicken Mac runs on five versions off macOS, two more than the "official" current-plus-two-older versions. I don't know if their testing is rigorous on the oldest operating systems, or if they simply make assumptions based on the changes Apple has made not involving/impacting the tools and libraries they are using. And when a bug is reported in a new Quicken release, and it turns out to be specific to an older operating system, they do go in and fix those problems.

Conversely, when they know they are adding something new which on't work on the oldest of the operating systems in use, or they don't want to extend their testing backwards any farther, they will notify users that the next release won't run on the current oldest operating system. I sort of expect that whatever Quicken Mac release comes out around the time the next macOS (Sequoia) is released this fall, they will drop support for mac OS 11 (Big Sur) — which would still keep Quicken Mac able to run on the current plus four older versions of macOS.

Chris_QPW

Hmm, OK I will take your word for it, if they do all that then there isn't any reason why this feature should be overridden.