The new Quicken Essentials for Mac - $69.99 for Intel-based Macs running OS X 10.5 or 10.6 - represents a major reinvention of the program. And this time, the Mountain View, Calif., company made its deadline with three days to spare. Instead, Intuit announced last summer that it was giving the program yet another rewrite and would now deliver it in February of 2010. In January of 2009, Intuit again demonstrated its upcoming Mac program and said it expected to ship it that summer. In January 2008, Intuit representatives showed off a new, written-from-scratch Mac program that would be called Quicken Financial Life and ship in the summer of that year.
That's one of those headlines that a lot of people never expected to see, on the order of 'Nationals win pennant' or 'Metro extension to Dulles opens.' Intuit last shipped a new version of its Quicken personal-finances manager for Apple's Mac OS X in the summer of 2006 - but that version exhibited the same defects as earlier Mac releases, including limited support for online banking and zero support for the Intel processors in new Macs.
