Intuit's Aaron Patzer hints at Apple licensing Rosetta

So the article came out in June, it is now October. None of this came true. Nice reporting, and nice head fake, Intuit.

I'll bet Apple execs are pissed that Patzer let that cat out of the bag.

Man, I hope nomachine hurries up and builds their nxclient binary on intel. That's the only thing I have left that is still 100% ppc code. Just the nxclient binary itself too, basically the shell that calls the universal nxssh binary and x86_64 binary /usr/NX/bin/* files. Why it's still only pcc, I don't know. I recall there being issues for a few weeks after 10.6 first came out too.

What the heck was Intuit thinking making their code so specific? It's a financial program, you should be able to write it all in C and Objective-C without anything processor specific. And why does it take 6+ years to update it?

I thought this was a joke, but then saw it wasn't April. What a deep pocketed company like Intuit can't make a proper Mac 64 bit, Intel version of Quicken? The PPC transition happened 5 years ago! This isn't some poor indie developer that deserves our pity; this is an indifferent PC-centric developer that want's mac users' $$'s but won't put in the effort to earn them.

If anyone needed a competitor, it's Intuit. What's with the US Department of "Just Us" letting Intuit purchase their competitors without any anti-trust investigation?

Developers, listen up: I would purchase a Quicken knock-off in a second. And my professional bookkeeper spouse would switch all her clients over, as well. Intuit has taken the Apple community for granted for too long! (Extra points -- and dollars -- for easy, two-way communication with MySQL. We have to write the bits that Intuit doesn't do in a database, and MySQL will come standard with Lion.)

So the reason why Rosetta stopped working with Lion is Apple decided that they aren't going to compile PPC versions of their libraries anymore for the PPC code to link to. If this article is true, then it means that Apple has the libraries compiled as PPC, but they'll only give them to companies (with money) and not their users.

I really have to stop being so foolish and buying games for the Mac...

I'm happy to hear this. As much as I hate to say it, I'm stuck with Quicken for now. I have almost twenty years of investment transactions that no other Mac software can currently deal with. The lack of Rosetta will keep me from upgrading to Lion on my main Mac. Hopefully, Intuit will eventually come up with a modern Quicken that can replace Quicken 2007. Until then, I'm trapped.

I wonder why Intuit would invest such resources in a 4 year old obsolete program instead of its current product, Quicken Essentials. Then again, I'm told that incompatibility with the Windows product is a matter of deliberate policy at Intuit. I also wonder why Apple lets Intuit's President to stay on their board. What value does Intuit deliver to Apple?

And WHY would anyone buy an application from a developer who is too (bleeping) cheap to actually develop for the current/future platform? That's particularly true of a company with deep pockets such as Intuit.