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Crossove Cable With Old iMac to New iMac?
- Thread starter nickm11
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You don't need a crossover cable to connect any remotely recent Macs. It's probably not significantly faster than connecting over your local network (it doesn't use the internet), though, unless you have very slow wifi.
Not your internet connection speed, that doesn't matter because migration assistant doesn't go out over the internet. Only your local wifi speed matters.
I agree with chrfr that it's probably not significantly faster than using your wifi. But if you want to use an ethernet cable, go for it. If your old iMac has Thunderbolt with USB-C it will be significantly faster to connect the two machines that way.
Crossover cables are obsolete for gigabit (1000Base-T) and 10G ethernet. There are four twisted pairs in the cabling. Instead of dedicating some pairs to transmit and some to receive, gigabit standards use all four pairs for both transmit and receive, simultaneously. As a side effect, you never need to cross pairs over to make the link work.
Even 10/100Base-T often worked without crossovers, provided both ends implemented the auto MDI-X feature.
Even 10/100Base-T often worked without crossovers, provided both ends implemented the auto MDI-X feature.
I just upgraded to a new Mac last week. First I tried WiFi for migration assistant - what a nightmare. It was going to take over 18 hours. So instead I used a thunderbolt cable between both Mac’s, and transfer only took ~3 hours! Direct connection is also far more reliable than wireless.
Yes, thunderbolt will be a lot faster than Wifi, but the OP is talking about "crossover cables" implying outdated ethernet equipment and knowledge and guaranteeing at best a gigabit speed link, which is slower than most routers of the last decade or so at least in theory. If they have a thunderbolt cable lying around, that's the best option by far, but if not, wifi is likely at least as fast and reliable as a "crossover cable" connected to two gigabit ethernet ports
You can use any Ethernet cable as (lightly mentioned by @mr_roboto ) auto-MDI-X has been implemented for at least a couple of decades. Although, if you go peer-to-peer (i.e., no router or other DHCP server), you’ll probably need to assign static IPs and other network details as self assigned is often ineffective (in my experience).
Thunderbolt is indeed an alternative.
However, do you not have a backup (drive)? If not, that’s a big no-no, which you’ll probably very much regret at some point. Anyway, a backup — whether Time Machine, cloned or other — is often one of the top choices for migration.
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Connect the 2 computers directly to each other with a regular (not crossover) cat5 (or better) ethernet cable. Yes it is faster than wifi, I know because that is exactly what I did. You can even do it midway through the migration transfer and it will autodetect the faster connection and switch from wifi to ethernet. Again, I know this because that is what I did.
Sorry, they have simply made it too easy to do.
Best way to migrate is by using a backup drive. It can be
time machine
CarbonCopyCloner
SuperDuper
A cloned backup is the absolute best way, in my opinion.
If the Intel Mac is quite old, you might consider leaving the "applications" option Unchecked, but migrate other stuff.
Then re-install apps one-by-one.
time machine
CarbonCopyCloner
SuperDuper
A cloned backup is the absolute best way, in my opinion.
If the Intel Mac is quite old, you might consider leaving the "applications" option Unchecked, but migrate other stuff.
Then re-install apps one-by-one.
Nah, the easiest way to migrate is to just use the old computer. There’s nothing gained by cloning a disk and then using that as the source, it’s just an extra unnecessary step that has the exact same result in the end.
Migration Assistant with a Thunderbolt cable is the fastest and simplest method, assuming your Intel iMac is new enough to have TB3. If not, a Time Machine backup is great too, and it’s a good idea to have one going forward anyway. This also means you can keep using the old Mac while the new one is getting set up.