Posting a final update here about my experience with Turbotax's activation mayhem this year.
Our family has 3 Macbooks that run Turbotax on, and this year mine ate up 3 of the 5 machine license activations (Turbotax kept thinking it was a new machine, as discussed earlier), our daughter's computer behaved normally, and the last one ate up 2 activations, the 2nd activation happening right after our son-in-law updated Turbotax as he was just about to hit the button to file his taxes. That locked him out of Turbotax and he couldn't file.
I spent the next hour and a half on the phone with various Turbotax customer support people who had no idea about the problem, the first even insisting that there's no machine activation limit and that I must have filed 5 federal returns so they can't help me (no, and that isn't even remotely related to the computer activation problem I explained). She put me on hold a couple times, managing to hang up on me once, but to her credit she called back, then said she'd have to put me through to her supervisor, who I spoke with for about 20 seconds, before he put me on hold to check something, also hung up on me, and never called me back.
After waiting 15 minutes for the call that never came, I called in again and reached a very helpful woman who explained to me that she didn't have the info to connect me to who I was speaking with before, so we'd have to start all over again. I explained what was going on with activations, pointed her to this support thread, and to my surprise, she looked at it, understood what I was saying and agreed that there was a technical problem. She searched for a solution for probably 20 minutes before she said "I don't see any way to really fix the problem, and I have no way to get any information to the development team about this, but I'll issue you a new license that should get you past your tax filing at least." She issued the new license, and my son-in-law was able to activate on his computer and file.
Once I had the new license, I decided to run the software update on my own version of Turbotax which was still activated on my machine. As soon as the update finished, Turbotax presented me with the activation screen again and told me 5/5 machines had been activated. This was the 4th activation on my laptop, which had not been updated or had any hardware changes since I installed Turbotax this year.
At this point, only one computer on the original license was still working with the other 4 activations used up (but not matching the computers we'd activated on). This is a great example of how bad the bug is. I entered the new license on my machine and was able to activate a 2nd seat on that one to gain access again.
I just filed a return and in the Turbotax survey, I selected "0 chance that I'll recommend the software to anyone," explained the reason, and included a link to this discussion. Will that make a difference? Probably not.
Our family has been filing with Turbotax for over 10 years, but next year we're moving on unless this thread gets updated by someone on the product/development team indicating that the problem is being looked into and has been fixed. Again, I'm happy to work through it with someone on the team; I'm a software engineer, so I can give you some good feedback. I hope the problem gets resolved, but at least there are other tax solutions now.
I don't know what more to say. There's no way I'm going through this grief again next year.
