I really didn’t mean for it to happen, but I was so keyed up after the Mac mini upgrade, that I was champing at the bit to swap out my seven year old iMac Pro with its hot running Intel chip for a spanking new Mac Studio with an Apple M4 Max chip.

So on Sunday morning I went to Apple’s web site, not really meaning to press the trigger, but in the end I couldn’t help myself, I pressed the trigger and ordered a Mac Studio with a Studio Display. I scheduled a pick up for the afternoon.

I walked to the store as it was a pleasant spring day and I wanted the exercise, and wouldn’t you know it, but there was Baldy again, though he didn’t recognize me. I thought I could get the Mac Studio in my backpack but it didn’t quite fit, and even the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad was too long to let me zip the backpack completely closed, although the Magic Trackpad fit in there ok. So I ended up having to carry both the Mac Studio and the Studio Display, which had a combined mass of something over twenty pounds—a bit too much to comfortably carry across town back to my house.

So I ordered a Lyft. Happily the driver did not play any music or engage in inane conversation, so I gave her a tip.

Then I had to make two decisions. Did I want to set the new system up right away or wait until the morning? And did I want to set it up as a new system from scratch or did I want to use Apple’s Migration Assistant to copy all the files and configurations from the old system?

Clearly I couldn’t wait, so I was going to set it up right away, but the second question was more difficult. I had been mulling it over ever since I decided to upgrade. On the one hand, I had a lot of custom configuring on the old system that I didn’t want to lose and didn’t relish having to recreate. On the other hand, I had installed and deleted a bunch of apps over the years and there was probably a lot of built up cruft that might come along if I migrated everything.

In the end I decided to migrate.

So I connected the two systems with a Thunderbolt cable for the fastest transfer rate and started it up.

While I keep most of my data on external disk drives, there was a still a lot to be transferred.

I nearly had a heart attack when the initial time estimate that the software gave me was twelve hours, but that quickly kept revising downward and in the event the whole transfer took a bit under two hours.

To my amazement, everything that I tried seemed to work perfectly. Or nearly so.

There were a few bumps, but those were mainly due to Apple’s latest OS and the difference in the keyboard layout (why did they decide to put the fn key there?); I had the previous Mac OS of the old system as the Intel processor couldn’t handle the latest Mac OS. So there were some differences in things like the Mail and Music apps, for example.

But for the most part, the things that mattered had all transferred over.

It was the smoothest transition I’ve ever had.

Now everything runs more smoothly, photos sync immediately rather than having to wait for the Mac to “cool down”, videos compress more quickly, when I copy a file across the network I no longer get the colored spinning beachball telling me I can’t do anything until the action completes. 

Most of the registrations for my apps came across with no problems, but in a few cases I needed to re-register them, which was simply a matter of looking up the code in the email and pasting it back into the app.

There is one problem looming on the horizon involving an open source app that I rely on that will not be supported in the near future, but I’ll discuss that in a forthcoming post.

For now I’m reveling in the joy of the easy migration.