One of the biggest complaints we hear about upgrading to Lion is its inability to run PowerPC applications. When Apple made the switch from PowerPC to Intel processors in 2006, they included a utility called Rosetta so people could continue using their old programs on their newer Macs. This “on the fly” translation was so seamless that most people didn’t even know it was happening in the background.
Apple announced early on that Lion would not have Rosetta support; thus all PowerPC applications would cease to work. They had supported legacy applications for five years, and finally drew the line in the sand. The rule of thumb seemed to be that applications written after 2006 should be okay, or at least need an update to make them work. In some cases, it was in the form of a paid upgrade (such as with Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite.)
Unfortunately, this was not the case with Intuit; they wrote Quicken 2007 using PowerPC code, and provided no patch to make it Intel compatible. Their statement was that the entire program—including the database—was written using code specific to PowerPC systems, so translating it to Intel code would not be trivial. The public’s reaction was that Intuit must be abandoning the Mac community, since they released another PowerPC version two years after Apple announced that they were switching to Intel. Intuit recommended that people use their new product—Quicken Essentials—however, this did not offer the same features as Quicken 2007, and was rejected by many as a downgrade.
There are other programs available, such as Mint.com (now owned by Intuit) or iBank, but reviews are mixed on those alternatives. (It’s possible that iBank was just not ready for the sudden influx of switchers, resulting in slow support.)
One proposed solution was to reinstall Snow Leopard and wait, but this only works on systems that were upgraded to Lion. New Macs that came with Lion preinstalled can’t run on anything earlier, so your shiny new 2011 MacBook Air is not going to let you install Snow Leopard on it. Another idea was to install Snow Leopard as a guest OS, giving back the ability to run Rosetta apps.
However, there are legal issues with this method—while Apple has no problem with Lion being run as a virtual machine, they do not allow Snow Leopard as a VM unless it’s the Server version. Parallels does not allow it unless you are installing Snow Leopard Server, and while Fusion currently does support running Snow Leopard, VMware claims this was a mistake and will be releasing a patch soon to restrict it to Server only.
As an experiment, I installed Snow Leopard into VirtualBox; the installation crashed twice, forcing me to start over. Finally, six hours later it was installed, but caused my MacBook Pro to kernel panic while configuring it. Legality aside, I can’t recommend it as a viable solution.
Fortunately, Intuit has changed its mind on Lion support. Registered owners have been receiving email notices that Quicken 2007 will be upgraded to support Lion next spring. Aaron Forth, of their Personal Finance Group, acknowledged that Intuit has not always delivered on their commitment to their Mac customers, and said, “I understand the frustration this may have caused you and have put a team in place to address this issue. I am happy to announce that we will have a solution that makes Quicken 2007 for Mac ‘Lion-compatible’ by early spring.” Intuit put up a FAQ for “Lion-Compatible Quicken 2007,” which can be accessed here. (Note that at press time, their site is experiencing heavy traffic, so it may take a little while to load correctly!)
It is not clear whether this is a complete re-write of the program, or if they are providing a Rosetta-like “wrapper” that allows the program to run under Lion. However they pull it off, this is welcome news for people who have held off upgrading because they don’t want to give up using Quicken.
If you were delaying the upgrade to Lion because of potential application compatibility, Roaring Apps is a great web site to check first. You can click on “Mac” to browse the list of known apps, or search for a specific program from the home page. They’ve recently added an iOS section too, so if you want to check compatibility of your apps before upgrading to iOS 5, it’s one-stop shopping.