Migration assistant...

[therealseebs]

So, I'm to the point of trying to migrate things from a pre-2016 MBP to a 2016 MBP.

This appears to be dongle mandatory. Old machine has firewire and possibly thunderbolt, which I could use with target disk mode, but new machine has neither. (Also, I have never had migration assistant run successfully using thunderbolt.) I don't have any firewire<->USB-C adapters, and haven't seen any yet. So I can try USB-C to Thunderbolt for target disk mode. Or I can make fresh time machine backups, and use a USB-C to USB-A dongle to attach to a drive.

This... seems suboptimal. Am I missing a thing? Was there supposed to be a way to do this that didn't require at least one brand new cable I'll probably not need for anything else?

EDIT: So apparently, you can't do the target disk "just hook up the old mac's disk" thing anymore. You have to have a time machine backup, or be running migration assistant on the old mac. Also, apparently, this 4-year-old machine running OS X 10.10.5 has a "newer" iTunes, which means that the iTunes library can't be copied. It can't be copied because it can't be used without newer iTunes, and "okay, copy it, I'll update iTunes once I can boot at all" is not one of our options.

 

[Orien]

I did the migration over wifi - why don't you try that?

 

[therealseebs]

I did the migration over wifi - why don't you try that?

I am pretty sure wifi is well over an order of magnitude slower than thunderbolt. I don't really want to find out how long it takes to copy 500GB over our old and not especially fast wireless.

 

[Ataricade]

migrated mine wifi. took about a hour

 

[cmaier]

was there a time you didn't have to run migration assistant on the old system? As far as i can recall I've always had to do that. Maybe I'm forgetting the old days

 

[Virgo]

I did migration assistant over wifi last night. I think it took a little over 2 hours for 150gb

 

[therealseebs]

Well, it's currently doing Thunderbolt. Says it has 3 hours to go, at 37MB/sec. Our wifi doesn't get 37MB/sec. It's 110Mbps, peak, so it's in practice not going to hit 10MB/sec.

... And I have to redo it again later, because apparently we need to do the migration to get the user accounts in place, THEN we can run software update, THEN we have new iTunes, which should in theory allow rerunning to copy the iTunes library. For reasons known only to Apple, we can't copy the library and just have it be inactive until iTunes is updated, and we also can't just copy over the newer version of iTunes the old machine supposedly has.

EDIT: Now it's saying a bit over an hour, and 58MB/sec. So that's something.

 

[Smoovejayy]

I use iCloud to store my documents/desktop files and when I logged into this Mac, everything synced perfectly. All I had to do was clean install programs and transfer other files. All in all, took about two hours to setup which isn't bad in my book.

 

[therealseebs]

That was sorta surreal. It told me it couldn't copy the itunes library, because itunes was too old. But it actually DID copy the itunes library anyway.

 

[Weaselboy]

That was sorta surreal. It told me it couldn't copy the itunes library, because itunes was too old. But it actually DID copy the itunes library anyway.

I think you may have misread that warning. I got a similar warning and what it said was I would not be able to use the iTunes library until I updated the iTunes version on the new MacBook. So the library was moved over and I just ran software update after to get the newest iTunes version.

 

[therealseebs]

I think you may have misread that warning. I got a similar warning and what it said was I would not be able to use the iTunes library until I updated the iTunes version on the new MacBook. So the library was moved over and I just ran software update after to get the newest iTunes version.

Yes, that's what the warning said, but it said my options were "skip" or "update itunes now". And it couldn't update, so I had to pick "skip".