For instance, on August 22nd, 1994, I paid $753 for a 1GB hard drive-ouch!) Now, though, I’ve had the shipping version of Quicken Essentials on my machine for two days, and have given it what I consider the ultimate test: I fed it my Quicken 2006 data file, containing every financial transaction I’ve been involved with since 1993-nearly 17 years’ worth of data! (This is a depressing history to look through, so I try my best to avoid it. When I chatted with Patzer about Essentials, the product wasn’t out yet and I hadn’t seen it in person, so we spent a few minutes discussing the features of the new program.

But no, here I am again with a First Look at Quicken Essentials for Mac I guess I’m a glutton for punishment or something.

After all the exceedingly positive…oh wait, it was incredibly negative…response to my podcast discussion with Aaron Patzer, head of Intuit’s Quicken team, you think I’d run away from anything having to do with Quicken Essentials.