Unbelievably frustrating new MacBook setup

[Supermallet]

I got an M3 Pro MacBook Pro a few weeks ago and have been backing it up dutifully with Time Machine to my NAS. I decided I didn't need that much power and switched to a MacBook Air M2. I got it at 9 AM yesterday, turned it on and during the setup it gave me the option to restore from Time Machine. I noticed there were two backups available, I chose the most recent one. It took Time Machine over 12 hours to restore as I had no USB C to ethernet adapter so I had to use wifi. This was already annoying, but my bad for using wifi. Once I did set it up, somehow the backup I restored from was not just old, despite the date on it being within the last week, but it looked like a backup for my Mac Mini, which is impossible because that backup is separate in the NAS with an entirely different password on it. And yet, there were multiple apps that I never installed on my MacBook Pro at all on it like LimeChat and Alfred and others (I have no clue what LimeChat even is and don't have it installed on any of my devices). It also had my old password manager on it, which I also never installed on my MBP. Baffling. I took this in stride and went to delete all of the apps I didn't need, selecting them all from the applications folder and dragging them to the trash, but they didn't move. I hit cmd+del and that didn't work either, I got an error sound, despite being logged in as the admin user. I then tried to move the apps to the desktop just to see if I could do anything with them, thinking I might be able to delete them if I could get them out of the applications folder, and it created shortcuts for all of those apps. Okay, that's the way the OS works, I get it. I went to delete the shortcuts and I got error messages saying that they contained data that was unreadable.

At this point I've had it. I decide to erase all contents and start from fresh. Clearly something was wrong with the backup. I selected the option in settings and it prompted me to sign out of iCloud. I put in my password and the window just sat there with a spinning circle icon. I ended up having to force quit, restart, and then sign out. Finally it reset and I reactivated the computer and started the new computer login process (wish I had just done this instead of wasting 12+ hours). When it gets to the iCloud login, it asks me not just for my password but also for the password to my iPad. I loathe this feature of iCloud because 9 times out of 10, it fails to recognize the correct password for the device it's asking for. As I feared, it told me my iPad password was wrong even though I know I put it in correctly and prompted me to use my recovery key. It then tells me that my recovery key is also wrong, forcing me to go into iCloud settings on my phone and generate a new key just so I can use that (I know the first key was correct because when you generate a key you have to enter it back into the phone to confirm you've recorded it correctly).

Finally I'm in and my iCloud login has been accepted. I go to download the latest OS update and it says it will take 30 minutes to download. I install apps in the meantime and fiddle with settings. When it says it's ready to install, I click install and get an error that the install package was corrupted. WHAT?! So then it forces me to download it again. That finishes, I go to install it, and it freezes, I have to force quit the installer. I go back to settings to do the update and it makes me download it AGAIN. Finally at 4:30 AM the latest update is installed and I have most of my apps and preferred settings running.

I usually love the Apple user experience, I've been using Macs since the 1990s. This was easily the single most frustrating series of interactions I've had with any Apple product. When their services just work, it feels magical. When they don't, it feels completely broken. It's really taken the joy out of setting up a new computer, and has turned it into a massive pain. Also I still have no clue why the Time Machine backup was so completely borked as to include apps I never even installed on the computer I was restoring from. That is well and truly baffling.

I've got everything working now, I just needed to vent because my god this was a grueling experience and it shouldn't have to be this way.

 

[Basic75]

That could be anything, you might have done something wrong, it might be a hardware issue like the RAM being flaky but without ECC there's no way to tell, perhaps your backup is somehow corrupted and you didn't notice, you might just have hit a combination of events that made macOS go into tilt, who knows...

 

[za9ra22]

To counterbalance this, my M3 MBA set up from a (USB connected) Time Machine backup of my old system in about an hour total from getting it home, and has been running perfectly since. Indeed, I was so surprised it was this simple and seamless, and that the only delay in getting the new machine running was the 10 minutes I spent searching for the drive because I had put it in the 'wrong' place, that I posted about how much better the transition from old to new system had been than the last time I did a TM restore about 5 years ago across a network.

Which is not to discount the frustrations when something that ought to go well fails to do so, and in the above case it is hard to see what it was that went wrong, but clearly when it does go wrong, it can be a real doozy.

 

[Supermallet]

To counterbalance this, my M3 MBA set up from a (USB connected) Time Machine backup of my old system in about an hour total from getting it home, and has been running perfectly since. Indeed, I was so surprised it was this simple and seamless, and that the only delay in getting the new machine running was the 10 minutes I spent searching for the drive because I had put it in the 'wrong' place, that I posted about how much better the transition from old to new system had been than the last time I did a TM restore about 5 years ago across a network.

Which is not to discount the frustrations when something that ought to go well fails to do so, and in the above case it is hard to see what it was that went wrong, but clearly when it does go wrong, it can be a real doozy.

Oh yes, I’m not trying to suggest that this is the norm. I restored my Mac Mini from my previous MacBook using USB and it also took about an hour and was seamless. This was just the unluckiest confluence of events.

 

[za9ra22]

Oh yes, I’m not trying to suggest that this is the norm. I restored my Mac Mini from my previous MacBook using USB and it also took about an hour and was seamless. This was just the unluckiest confluence of events.

I think if I had one big complaint about this kind of issue, it's that as much as Apple make it work typically really well and smoothly, when it does go wrong, they make it extremely hard to work out why, what happened, and to fix it.

I'd guess there's not a practical way they could do it differently, and since it almost always works really well, probably not much reason to try, but your experience is a good example of what happens when 'it just works' actually doesn't!

 

[Papanate]

I got an M3 Pro MacBook Pro a few weeks ago and have been backing it up dutifully with Time Machine to my NAS.

I've got everything working now, I just needed to vent because my god this was a grueling experience and it shouldn't have to be this way.

Well I bought a MacBook Pro M3 and tried cable to cable backups and it took 3.5 hours - then when I tried to do a TimeMachine Backup I got the error that iCloud had not finished syncing - for 3 days - Repeated calls to Tech where they did all sorts or work arounds - I just said screw it and returned the machine.

1 month later I bought a refurbished MacBook Pro M3 Pro - and I stopped my old MacBook Pro from syncing to iCloud - got all my files local on External Harddrives and the Internal Harddrive - did Migration with a Cable - took 20 minutes and then started my Time Machine Backup - and it asked if if I wanted the new Mac to take ownership (which I said Yes) and then did a full backup in 20 minutes.

Apple when it works really works - when it doesn’t it makes me hate Macs.

 

[Supermallet]

Well I bought a MacBook Pro M3 and tried cable to cable backups and it took 3.5 hours - then when I tried to do a TimeMachine Backup I got the error that iCloud had not finished syncing - for 3 days - Repeated calls to Tech where they did all sorts or work arounds - I just said screw it and returned the machine.

1 month later I bought a refurbished MacBook Pro M3 Pro - and I stopped my old MacBook Pro from syncing to iCloud - got all my files local on External Harddrives and the Internal Harddrive - did Migration with a Cable - took 20 minutes and then started my Time Machine Backup - and it asked if if I wanted the new Mac to take ownership (which I said Yes) and then did a full backup in 20 minutes.

Apple when it works really works - when it doesn’t it makes me hate Macs.

Usually I can restore from a computer I still have but in this case I was relying on the backup in my NAS. Lesson learned to get an Ethernet to USB-C adapter if I need to do that again in the future.

 

[Fishrrman]

For the fastest migration, I'd suggest migrating FROM a CLONED backup created with either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper.

Create or update it on the old Mac "just before" you unpack the new Mac and begin setup.