It turns out that the message itself was the problem. The message just said 'the tax program needs to be updated'. When I checked for updates it said I was up to date. The real problem was turbotax had updates, but couldn’t apply them without me first having to install updates to ios on the Imac. After I installed available updates to the ios, then started turbotax, the updates became available, and were noted as ‘very important’. Whille this was true, the lanquage in the error message could have said ‘ we have imprtant updates to install, but need you to update your operating system’. After completing the above updates, it worked fine.
