Apple - How Do I Love Thee? — An Architect's View

Apple - How Do I Love Thee?

March 23, 2007 · 6 Comments

My 17" MacBook Pro arrived today. Last time I switched laptops, I did the entire migration manually and it took me several days to get everything across and running properly. This time I decided to try the "easy" route using a FireWire cable and Apple's "Migration Assistant"... Unpack the MBP, plug it in, connect an ethernet cable, power up. The whole welcome experience is just so beautiful and warm and fuzzy that you instantly feel good - Apple have this so right! Do you want to migrate files from another Mac? Yes. Connect the FireWite cable, restart the other Mac and hold down the T key. Continue. Transferring files. Time passes. Up comes the new system, fully configured to exactly match the old system. Wow! That was easy. 60Gb+ of files and settings migrated without manual intervention. It's not quite perfect. Apollo didn't migrate so I had to reinstall that. MySQL didn't migrate either so I just copied /usr/local manually from the old laptop. iCal crashed when it was opened. Odd. Ran a Software Update (to 10.4.9 plus a bunch of other stuff). iCal works just fine now. Parallels wouldn't start either so I had to reinstall that but all my VMs and settings were still intact. Everything else seems to be running just fine. A very pleasant experience - thank you Apple!

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Tags: osx · personal

6 responses so far ↓

1 Andrew Powell // Mar 24, 2007 at 2:37 AM

I had the same experience going from my Mac Mini to my MacPro, except I used the Firewire connection. Very smooth though. I was impressed.
2 Mark // Mar 24, 2007 at 3:31 AM

Funny seeing almost exactly the same post in two places today :)

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/03/22/MacBook
3 TJ Downes // Mar 25, 2007 at 2:37 AM

Vista has a similar feature called Easy Transfer< it does require a "special" $40 cable, but it makes quick work of the migration and I've yet to find any flaws in it after doing 6 migrations
4 sal // Mar 26, 2007 at 6:43 AM

Oh how I concur on thou love towards apples...

;-)
5 Ken Dunnington // Mar 26, 2007 at 6:53 AM

Congrats on the new MBP, Sean. Know anyone who wants to buy a 15" MBP Core Duo so I can upgrade to the Core 2? :)

BTW, what made you choose the 'glossy' screen over the matte one?
6 Sean Corfield // Mar 26, 2007 at 10:16 AM

@Ken, better color definition with the glossy screen - and side-by-side with the matte screen of the 15" MBP they are light years apart. Downside? The glossy screen shows every smudge and it is *very* reflective in bright light conditions. Overall tho', a win at the moment.

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