Using Apple Migration Assistant to move from Windows to a Mac?

[JulianL]

After about 35 years I'll be switching my desktop PC environment from Windows to MacOS - moving from an Asus laptop to a MacBook Pro. I'm doing some research beforehand and just watched a video on using Apple's Migration Assistant (AMA) to transfer stuff from a Windows PC to a Mac and while it looked quite intuitive and straightforward the video mentioned that during the migration process the Mac would reboot twice (once towards the end and once at the very end of the process). That made me wonder exactly what AMA does because if it was just transferring files I don't understand why it's doing any reboots and even with settings I thought that MacOS tended to be better than Windows in terms of not needing to reboot as much for various settings changes some OS patches. This all makes me quite suspicious of AMA and quite hesitant to use it for my transfer.

So my first question is, is there any good technical description of exactly what AMA tries to transfer when doing a Windows PC to MacOS migration?

My second question is whether people who have done a Windows to MacOS migration have any advice or experiences to share? Did you use AMA or did you manually move everything across?

I'm leaning quite heavily towards doing my migration manually rather than using AMA. Whenever I've moved my Windows environment to a new PC or laptop I always set up the new system from scratch and manually copy everything over because (a) When it comes to my PCs I'm a bit of a control freak and like to know what's been done and (b) it gives me a chance to tidy stuff up and re-assess what I really need in terms of apps etc and whether I can delete anything or find better solutions.

All of my user files (Documents, Desktop, Music, Video, Pictures etc) are stored on a dedicated D: partition so I assume going to be very easy to identify and manually copy those to the appropriate new locations on my new Mac.

My email, contacts and calendar data are all with Google at the moment and I plan to move all of that to iCloud+ accessed via the native Apple apps so I assume that could be done as a stand-alone task with lots of tutorials available online for specifically how to do that.

For my notes I'm planning to move all of those from Microsoft OneNote to Apple Notes and I actually prefer to do that a note at a time so that I can do some purging and tidy-ups along the way. Similarly in moving my bookmarks from Edge to Safari I'm OK to do that manually so that I can do tidy-ups there as well.

And finally my password management is a mess with some old stuff still in LastPass and my critical stuff in Keeper. I intend to migrate all of that to Keychain and, as with my notes, I prefer to be hands-on with that so that I can purge, de-duplicate and tidy-up along the way.

I think that's about it. The only third party apps I use are Microsoft Office and I don't care about setting up my preferences on that again for the Mac versions so I don't see much (if any) benefit to me in using AMA apart from saving a bit of time in return for not having full knowledge/control of what's going on.

The only potential advantage I can see of using AMA is if it is intelligent enough to be able to convert Windows shortcuts to the MacOS equivalents. I'm not sure if MacOS uses symbolic or hard links and I'm not sure it matters - either way that is going to be a nightmare to do manually (probably 10 - 20 hours of my time) so just maybe if AMA does that automatically I might consider using it. Then again maybe I can get clever and use the AI facilities in automations to get AI to do it. I'll need to get my Mac to see what's possible there.

Any other general advice about migrating a Windows environment across to MacOS would be gratefully received.

 

[Alameda]

You're going to love the Mac!

There will be minor frustrations because some things are different than Windows, but after a month or two you're going to wonder why on Earth anyone still uses Windows.

I just upgraded my MacBook from the M1 to the M5. I didn't need to, but I did the same as you and manually migrated from my old Mac to the new one. Because of iCloud, many things transferred seamlessly: Contacts, Notes, Messages, Passwords, Calendar and Photos, among other things. And these things are all shared with iPhone. Having both Mac and iPhone is a wonderful combination. Of course you can use Android, but the combo isn't as nice.

Yesterday, I needed to print something, and realized I hadn't set up my printer on the new Mac. It took about four seconds to open Settings/Printers and add the new printer. It was as simple as: Mac finds printer and you click on it and it's ready. Mac users don't know what device drivers are; they've never heard of them. It is THAT good.

If you have an external SSD which supports USB 3.x and/or Thunderbolt, migration is incredibly fast -- you can push 100 GB to the SSD in a few seconds, attach it to the Mac and copy the files. One tip about file copying with Mac: Copy Folders, not Files. I don't know why, but if you copy a folder with 1,000 files inside, copy time is many times faster than opening a folder, selecting its 1,000 files, and copying the 1,000 files.

Some other tips: A Thunderbolt docking station is great. I put my Mac on the desk and attach one cable, and it connects me to Ethernet, 4K monitor, keyboard/mouse, card readers and power. The only thing I don't attach through the dock are my SSD drives. I attach them directly to my Mac when I need them and disconnect when I'm finished. Unlike Windows, the Mac does drive caching with external drives, so they need to be dismounted before disconnecting.

Some more storage advice: Mac can read NTFS but not write, and Mac can read/write xFAT. But the disk format that you want to use is called APFS, which gives you all of the Mac file system features and the best performance. Apple's file system includes disk encryption. Your internal disk is always encrypted, but you can secure it further by enabling FileVault. Because the disk is already encrypted, turning FileVault on takes about a second, because the files are already encrypted.

For an external keyboard/mouse, have a look at the Logitech MX keyboard/mouse combo. It is available with all of the Mac keys and it works very well. Speaking of keys:

Command (propeller): This key is equivalent to the Control Key on Windows. Command-S to Save, Command-P to Print, etc.

Option: This is for optional characters. Usually, option-<character> then <character>. For example, é is made by pressing Option-e and then e. Same thing with ñ and so forth.

Control: Apple reluctantly added this at some point, and it's useful in the unix terminal and in other nerdy applications where you want send control characters to another system.

 

[Fishrrman]

I've never done a Windows-to-Mac migration, so I watched the Apple support video on how to do it.

Looks manageable enough.

I'd try what Apple suggests first.

But be aware that some stuff may get "missed" -- which you'll have to correct "manually".