We've used Quicken for Mac for the past few years. We carefully disabled storage of our financial data in Quicken's Cloud service (used for Mobile and, I assume, sold to marketers). After the latest update I discovered our data was mirrored to Quicken's servers, even though our mobile sync was still disabled. About Quicken for Mac. While a step up from previous versions, Quicken 2019 for Mac still falls short of the gold standard, Quicken for Windows. The addition of a web-based platform is a welcome addition. For some, Quicken for Mac might be a usable native MacOS personal finance app.

Running Quicken on a Mac has been a frustrating experience. I’m a longtime Windows user and, in fact, started using Quicken back when it was an MS-DOS application. When I upgraded to Windows, I upgraded Quicken as well to run native under Windows. Now that I use an Apple Macintosh, I still use. The reasons are the numerous drawbacks with Quicken Macintosh version: • Long Development Life Cycles: Only every 3–4 years does Quicken upgrade their software.

• Missing Features: Compared to the Windows version it’s missing many features. • Buggy Software: As reported by many reviewers on Amazon, the native MacOS product is very buggy as well. Back in the old days of computing, the only viable way to run Windows was to get a dedicated machine to run the software.

Of course this can be costly and take up massive amounts of desktop space. Not only this, but it’s also impractical. Today you have the option to create a virtual machine within your Macintosh to run other operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows. So the advantages are less hardware to maintain and the ability to run software not natively available for Apple’s macOS.

There are two reasons why I do this: • There’s no other viable alternative application available for Mac. • Security is increased by virtualization. Increased Security by Virtualization Let me touch on the second reason in a little bit more detail. The added benefit of virtualizing your personal finance software is security. Youtube downloader. By keeping Quicken installed on its own copy of Windows (in fact also completely separate from macOS), it minimizes the chances of getting malware, viruses, and Trojans.

This, of course, assumes you run nothing else on this virtual instance, nor do any tasks other than. This is critical. It sandboxes your personal finance within a virtual machine that’s dedicated to no other tasks. All too often individuals unknowingly compromise their computer’s security by not updating software or by visiting websites with malware that can infect your computer.

By limiting activities to only Quicken this decreases the chances for infection and therefore increases the security of your personal finances. Before You Begin Before you begin, make sure your Mac is pretty recent (no more than, say, 3–4 years old) and has at least 4 GB of ram and 30GB of available hard drive space. Otherwise, the machine will not have enough resources to run Windows and Quicken at the same time you wish to run other OS X native applications. These steps apply not only to Quicken for Windows but really to any Windows-based program you wish to run on a Mac. Summary: Here’s How to Get Quicken for Windows To Run on a Macintosh • • • • • • Total time to perform these steps should be less than one hour. Get Your Virtualization Software I personally recommend to run for your virtualization needs.