Add Lifetime/Retirement Planner to Quicken Mac (70 Legacy Votes)

I don’t know how many people have not even tried the Lifetime Planner. Mind boggling. It’s what got me through most large life and financial hurtles. I “knew” I could do it thanks to Quicken.

Reporting is many times easier in the windows versions also. Mac “hard codes” most. Not flexible.

I don’t understand why recent updates haven’t fixed this difference.

I’ve never used Regina. But I am familiar with remote viewing and usage. I find them slow. But then so is windows under Parallels. I give up.

John, I agree. I have to imagine there is some plan for rewriting the Quicken Windows app at some point, because continuing to graft patches onto patches onto patches of code that has been created in different development environments over three decades probably has some finite limit. But any misstep in that process could send users scurrying away to competing products, so they need a really well-thought out approach to any such project.

As we've seen with the Quicken Mac redevelopment from the ground up, there are many landmines. First, the developers decided not to try to build an exact replica of the old Quicken Mac (nor Quicken Windows), but to build a product that offered similar features, re-thought, to see if they could be done better, and leaner. That approach resulted in some things that are indeed better about the modern Quicken Mac than the old -- but I think they underestimated how many features, large and small, from the old product that users would clamor for; I think they had hoped to eliminate some of the things that had been grafter on over many years of development, only to find that users wanted those features back.

Now, the Mac project was a mess from the start, so it cannot be looked at as a good, clean-sheet rebuild. It was first conceived to be a pretty different product, and was infused with a bit of DNA from Mint, which Intuit bought and then promptly installed the Mint CEO as head of the Quicken division. The first effort of the Mac re-write didn't even make it out of beta. The second effort was the severely under-powered Quicken Essentials. When sales of Essentials floundered because it didn't meet the needs of many users, and the former Mint CEO departed, new Intuit management eventually decided it was time to build on the start of Essentials and turn it into a full-fledged Quicken Deluxe for Mac. Unfortunately, they assigned only a few people to the development team, so the progress was slow; when the new Quicken came out as Quicken 2015, it was really a minimum viable product -- an upgrade for long-suffering Essentials users, but a step backward for Quicken 2007 users. Over the past five years, the developers have slowly worked to build out the feature set of Quicken Mac, and after separating from Intuit, the development team was enlarged to help speed up development -- but they still have a very long list of feature requests to implement.

Bottom line: hopefully Quicken learned a lot from the Mac re-write project, and has incorporated those lessons into their long-term plan for what to do with Quicken Windows. 

@vigiolto To cast your vote for this feature, you must go to the first page of this thread click the green "1" below, or just click here. In the blue box under the first post, click the little gray triangle under the vote counter; you'll see the vote go up by one.

@sbbabcock  Unfortunately, there is typically no "update" on a feature request until something is released; they rarely pre-announce future features.

Well, let me amend that a bit. If you click "1" to go to the first page of this thread and look at the blue voting box, you'll see it's currently marked "Under Consideration". That means that the idea has garnered enough votes that the forum moderators have submitted the idea to the Mac development team for evaluation: do they think it's a good idea? is it feasible to do? how much time would it take to implement? would it impact other areas of the program? is it compatible with or how would it affect mobile/web cloud usage? Etc. They eventually deem is something they'll commit to doing at some point in the future, and the status is changed to "Planned", or they decide it's not something they're going to put on the development roadmap, and the status is changed to "Not Planned".

Unfortunately for users, once an idea is marked "Under Consideration," it may stay that way for a long time; there are some ideas on this site that have been "Under Consideration" for two years! Part of the "consideration" the developers need to do is spec out what would be involved in the project so they know how much time it would take from different people on the development team; for major projects like creating a Lifetime Planner, just that evaluation phase can take a lot of time, and may therefore sit on the back burner for a long time. And then, if the idea advanced to being marked "Planned," we get no idea of where it sits on the very long priority list; some ideas go from Planned to released in months, while others take years.

So that's a long-winded explanation that there should be an interim update if/when this idea changes from "Under Consideration" to "Planned." But since it's been "Under Consideration" for 20 months as of the time this is written, I wouldn't hold your breath…