Which tax software platform should I use this year?

[mdlbear]

I've been using the same software for doing my taxes for somewhere around 30 years. It was called TaxCut back then; the company that made it was bought by H&R Block in 1993, though they didn't rename the software until 2008. For much, if not all, of that time I've been doing it on a Mac of some sort.

Last year I looked at the system requirements and discovered that it would no longer run on my ageing Mac Mini. It also wouldn't run on Windows 7. It needed either NacOS High Sierra or Windows 8.1. So I used their web version, which I remember as rather slow, and enough different from the offline version of previous years to be annoying.

So for this year (which is to say tax year 2021), my options would appear to be:

1. Use the web version again. Ugh, but at least it would import 2020 without trouble. Maybe. It didn't let me upload a 2019 data file; I had to feed it a PDF and do a lot of fixing up.
2. Run it on the laptop that has Win 8.1, or put the Win 10 disk that came with (new) Sable back in and use that. Ugh.
3. Buy a newer Mac Mini. I could get a minimal one for about $100-150, or a more recent one (running Mojave) for around $200-250. (Those are eBay prices, of course.)

(Note that cost of the software is the same for all three options.)

I'm really leaning toward #3. But really that would just be an excuse to buy another computer, and would leave me with two Mac Minis that I'd hardly ever use. More likely I'll dither about it until the end of March and then break down and go use the web version again.

Another fine post from The Computer Curmudgeon (also at computer-curmudgeon.com).
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Comments

[cellio]

Can your Mac run Parallels (or whatever the "run Windows in a VM" thing is these days)? Would it be less "ugh" to spin up a Win 8.1 VM on your Mac for the time it'll take you to do your taxes?

Do you do your taxes in one shot or do you dither over them over days or weeks? If the former, do you know anybody who might let you use a computer for an afternoon? If that person also wants to use the software, there'd be some benefit for that person too.

[mdlbear]

Hmm -- Windows in a VM is a possibility I hadn't considered.

I usually do taxes over the course of a couple of weeks, often finishing at the last possible minute.

[madfilkentist]

How old is your Mac Mini, that you can get a newer one for a hundred dollars?

My current one is a 2014 generation machine. Ever since I "upgraded" it to Catalina, it has crawled horribly. I'm currently waiting for delivery of a new one, with maximum memory, in the hope that it will crawl faster.

I used H&R Block software last year, having discovered in previous years that TurboTax is horrendously buggy on the Mac. If I ran TurboTax in a non-admin account, it would crash silently, giving me no clue why it wouldn't run till I tried different things.

[mdlbear]

Late 2009. I just searched on eBay for "mac mini high sierra"; the product pages don't say whether they run it well, of course. Good to know about Catalina.

[cellio]

My 2014 Mini that I just upgraded from a few months ago was running Sierra (not High Sierra, 'cause when it came out I didn't trust it for some now-forgotten security thing). I am, as a matter of course, slow to take OS upgrades -- if it ain't broke don't fix it and all that. When I got the new machine it had Big Sur on it, and also rather more memory than the machine it replaced.

If you get a 2014 Mini and stick to pre-Catalina and you aren't planning to tax it heavily (like, I wouldn't do video production on it), you should be fine. I still reach into mine (via remote desktop) at times because some software didn't make the jump to Big Sur. (Yeah, that's another thing about Apple -- too often I hear about people upgrading the OS and then discovering things that don't work any more. Doesn't inspire me to jump on updates, y'know?)

[andyheninger]

Late 2009 Mac Mini, you might be able to use OpenCore to install a recent MacOS on it. Disclaimer: I've not tried this myself. Who knows, it may turn into a frustrating rat hole. If the machine hasn't been upgraded to have an SSD it will probably be unbearably slow.

Several years back I ran a VirtualBox Windows VM, hosted on my main Linux desktop, even using it to do my taxes. It worked fine, although I ultimately abandoned it in favor of an actual small Window system that I fell into. (Plus a KVM switch)

As to what tax software, I've been using TurboTax forever. It works, but Intuit is something of a slimeball company, it's a little pricey, especially if you need the premier version to handle investments, and the UI is confusing in places. I stick with it because I've learned my way around it over the years, and I don't want to spend any extra time figuring out the quirks of something else.

For you, the same reasoning suggests sticking with H&R Block.

[gorgeousgary]

While I like TurboTax, I'm not sure it doesn't qualify as bloatware at this point. It's certainly slower on my admittedly-aging Win 8.1 laptop than other common programs (like Office).

[solarbird]

Not directly related, but old Mac Minis running Linux and Plex make really great media servers that Roku will talk to directly.

Our media server is a 2006 Mac Mini that I convinced was a 2007 Mac Mini with all of three (3) gigs of RAM. Works a treat.

Just a thought for what to do with the old hardware...

[mdlbear]

Yeah; media server is a likely outcome. Unless I end up giving it to one of the kids.