Why is AAPL sorted to bottom of security symbol list when in ascending order? (Q Mac)

It's sorting in the correct order for me in the Securities window.

I added VAAPX, ZAAG, and ZZLL to my securities list and they all appear in the correct positions:

I'm not doing anything special when I add these, just typing the symbol into the symbol field (though it didn't recognize VAAPX as a valid symbol).

@Bosco You're seeing the same thing that I am, yet @Jon is seeing different behavior. Interesting mystery.

I wondered if it could have anything to do with how the data file originated (e.g. Quicken Mac 2007 or Quicken Windows), but I found another clue. I have one Mac which is still running macOS Mojave (hanging onto a few old 32-bit programs!), so on that Mac I have Quicken still running version 6.12.6, because it cannot run version 7.x. To my surprise, my data files on that Mac all show the securities sorting by Symbol in the expected alphabetic order. And the key here is that my test data files on this and my other Mac all come from the same live data file. It's not the version of Quicken that's a factor, because I have old versions of Quicken on both Macs, and it sorts securities correctly on the Mojave Mac and incorrectly on the Ventura Mac in all versions (Quicken 2015, Quicken 2017, Quicken 6.12.x/7.x).

So what's different? Well, obviously the operating system. I also have a Mac which runs Catalina; I tested on that, and the security symbols sort correctly. So it could be something in the OS in Ventura. Or, I'm now thinking this difference might be an issue with the actual hardware chip in the Mac. My Mac running Ventura is an M2 Mac; my other two are older Intel Macs. Is it possible that something in the software compiler used by Quicken is resulting in this strange sort order for securities with "AA" in the symbol?

And that thinking drove me to an additional test which I think confirms my thinking that there's something special about "AA" in the sort order on the M2/Ventura Mac: I looked at Payees and found that Payees containing "AA" sort out of order on the M2/Ventura Mac, but sort correctly on the Intel/Mojave and Intel/Catalina Macs.

This is from the M2/Ventura Mac, showing Payees sorted in descending alphabetical order. We'd expect to see names with Z first, ending with A at the bottom. But seven payees which contain "AA" sort out of order, before the Z's:

Note also that it's not just a capitalized "AA"; it's also true of lower case "aa" and mixed case "Aa". And as seen with the security symbols, the "AA" doesn't need to be the first characters; in the example above, to securities which start with the letter "Z" should start with "Zwilling" and end with "Zaady's", but "Zaa" sorts out of order before "Zw". Again, this does not happen on the Intel Macs running Mojave and Catalina.

But wait, there's more! I then decided to type in a similar group of names in Apple's Numbers application and sort them. Guess what? The "AA" names sort in the wrong order in Numbers, too!

So that rules out this being a problem with the Quicken or the software compiler Quicken uses. It's a Mac problem, tied to either the version of macOS or the hardware, or possibly the SQLite database built into macOS. Where do we go from here? I've asked a moderator to flag this thread for the developers, so perhaps someone from that team will post a reply. Otherwise, I think we have to accept for now that this is a sorting issue with macOS which would need to be resolved by Apple. I don't even begin to know how to report an issue like this with Apple; I imagine the Quicken folks, as registered Apple developers, might know how to do so.

P.S. @Jon Remind me what hardware and operating system you're running on, to see if it fits into the narrative I've spun here. I'm hoping you're going to tell me you're on an Intel Mac. 😉

@jacobs Sorry. I've checked on both M1 and M2 Macs (both running latest Ventura 13.3.1(a)) and AAPL sorts correctly on both. I don't have an Intel Mac I can test with at the moment.

I did find something interesting, though. The fact that you saw this in both Quicken and Numbers (and I could not duplicate your results with Numbers either) makes me think that there's something going on at the OS level. So I went to System Settings and typed "sort" into the search bar and it directed me to the Language & Region tab. I didn't see any settings there that had anything to do with sorting, but when I clicked on the ? icon for help I found the following:

I have English (US) as my primary language, so that must not be one of the languages that lets you specify sort order. Those of you that are seeing this, do you have a different primary language selected and is there a List sort order setting on the Languages & Region tab in System Settings?

Here's a thread from 10 year ago where someone had this same problem in Pages, with double letters sorting after single letters - it isn't just "AA".

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4007692

Edit: After looking at that again, it's referring to ordered lists, not strings in general, so maybe that's something different.

So since we're all using US English, not Danish or Norwegian, why are we seeing this issue? And why are some of us seeing it, yet not seeing it with the same data file on an older Mac, and some of us are not seeing it at all? Hmmm…

I forgot we did "ZZLL" already, that answers that question.

The command line sort is a BSD unix utility, it's probably not using the sorting routines built into Mac OS X that Quicken & Numbers are using.

Digging into the SQL tables is beyond my pay grade. 😉

I shared your thought at first, but it doesn’t seem to hold up when you consider (a) some of us see the out-of-order sort and others don’t, (b) with a test file spun off from my live data file, I see the out-of-order sort on one Mac and not on two others, and (c) the same out-of-order sort occurs in Apple’s Numbers application.

Okay, so how does one accomplish this in Ventura? My Language & Region screen doesn't show a List Sort Order to check/adjust: