Just say ‘No’ to TurboTax.

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Like many readers of this journal I have been using TurboTax for Mac for aeons to prepare my taxes. The system works well in as much as anything can work well with the mess that is the Internal Revenue Code of the United States.

Now it so happens that I am happily running OS X High Sierra (10.13) on my 2010 Mac Pro, and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax has been making noises for a couple of years that I will soon have to upgrade to OS X Mojave (10.14) for their software to work. Intuit would have you believe that this is a change dictated by Apple and that no backward compatibility for TurboTax 2020 exists.

But the snag is that I cannot run Mojave without tossing out my excellent Nvidia GTX980 graphics card, replacing it with an ATI Radeon offering, as Mojave will not run on Nvidia GPUs. And I do not wish to make that change as the GTX980 remains as capable today as it was 5 years ago when installed.

So I shopped around and determined that it’s Intuit’s sloth, not Apple’s requirements, which is the cause of TT 2020 not running on my High Sierra/GTX980 setup. HR Block is the other leading vendor of US tax preparation software and here are their system requirements:

So I spent $37.79 which got me the application, by download from Amazon, and this includes one State tax application. Intuit is asking much the same for their basic software version. Well, that and a new $250 GPU.

And guess what? I asked the HRB app to find my 2019 TT return and it was imported in seconds, and all numbers match. So now I’m ready to prepare my 2020 taxes using HRB’s software and the costly GTX980 can remain in place.

Sure, you say. You could always use Intuit’s online tax prep software which is machine independent. And you expect me to trust these people with my data? Uh huh.