TurboTax 2020 conundrum re Mac High Sierra O/S

I've been informed by the folks at Intuit that I will NOT be able to do my 2020 taxes on my iMac using TurboTax unless I upgrade my O/S to Mojave or Catalina. My (perfectly functioning) 2012 iMac 27" is NOT UPGRADABLE beyond High Sierra, which I presently use. So... while I'm entirely ready, willing and able to purchase a new (2020) iMac with the Catalina O/S, I would VERY much prefer waiting a bit for the upcoming Apple Silicon line, with its new Apple chip and probably a larger than 27" display. It may be only a few months down the road, but I will likely miss the tax filing deadline if I want to use TurboTax-- which I have been comfortably using for many years and do not want to switch to some other program. It is a dilemma! Unless Intuit makes it possible to use High Sierra for its 2020 TurboTax version (which seems doubtful, I'm told at this time,) or the new Apple Silicon becomes available before the end of 2020 or very early 2021. Your thoughts, advice and guidance would be very much appreciated! Thank you.

Posted on Sep 16, 2020 12:19 PM

Top-ranking reply

Mrokcratron

Level 2

401 points

Posted on Oct 30, 2020 1:51 PM

If you installed Parallels you'd could run a copy of Windows 10 inside it w/ the Windows version of TurboTax, or you could run macOS inside it with the Mac version of Turbotax.

The easiest method would be on your 10.13 High Sierra iMac w/ Parallels to install a self-contained copy of macOS. This would be installed via Parallels utilizing your physical Macs Recovery Partition. I'm fairly sure Parallels on a 10.13 High Sierra machine would allow you to install directly a 10.14 or 10.15 Mojave or Catalina virtual Parallels machine directly. However the "worst" case is you would install a 10.13 High Sierra Parallels virtual machine...and then once it's working you'd upgrade the virtual machine to Mojave or Catalina. Either way, this would be the quickest and easiest way to get your a self contained macOS that'll use the Home/Business TurboTax you need. And it would be TurboTax for Mac.

The other option is to in fact install Windows 10 in the Parallels virtual machine. The downside of this is you would need to download the Windows 10 disk image (ISO) file from Microsoft. However, this is very easy and you can do it from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO

And Parallels would then utilize that image to create a Windows 10-based Parallels virtual machine. If you go this route then you would need to buy TurboTax for Windows. The advantage of this though is that you then have a Windows virtual machine which you could potentially have other uses for beyond TurboTax. The downside is that it is an extra step...but it's not much of an extra step.

How much RAM do you have though? As long as you have 8GB+ you're fine. Otherwise, if you only have 4GB of RAM I'd recommend at a cheap $30 RAM upgrade to bring you up to 8GB total. If you search for "mid 2011 iMac 4gb kit" you can get them for this price on Amazon. If you plan to retire your iMac in the coming months, that's all you need. If you plan to keep it, or give it to a family member, or someone deserving, then you can get an 8GB kit for $50 to have a total of 12GB or even spend $70 to get a 16GB kit.

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TurboTax 2020 conundrum re Mac High Sierra O/S

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