The IT Nerd

My wife has been thinking about getting a new MacBook Pro as she typically gets my “hand me downs” when I upgrade. Most recently she got my 2015 15″ MacBook Pro when I moved to the 16″ M1 Pro MacBook Pro that I have now. And other than the thing sometimes sounding like a jet engine at takeoff when she used it, she was fine with it. But two events changed that. The first was this:

That really scared her and got her thinking about a replacement. Which brings me to event number 2. Which is the supply shortage that Apple is facing at the moment. Though this has been documented in a variety of places, I’ll give you the key point. If you’re looking for Mac, and it isn’t in stock at your local Apple Store, you might be waiting months to get it. That really spooked her. So she did something that in 25 years of marriage I have never seen her do. She did a snap purchase of a 16″ MacBook Pro with the following specs:

• 16GB of RAM
• 1 TB of storage
• 10 CPU core, 16 GPU core M1 Pro processor

This was in stock at the Apple Store Yorkdale in North Toronto. Her only other option was the M1 Max variant with 32GB of RAM. But she decided that it was overkill for her needs. Which was mainly Word, Excel, web surfing, and email.

That led to me having the job of transferring her data from the old MacBook Pro to the new one. My original plan was to use a Time Machine backup for that purpose seeing as we both use Time Machine to back up our respective Macs. But that’s where I ran into an issue. During the setup process the new Mac’s setup wizard refused to see the NAS box where the Time Machine backup was. I could type in the DNS name of the NAS, or the IP of the NAS and it would make no difference. I then noticed that in the dialog box that the setup wizard was having me type the address or name of the NAS was referencing “afp://”. AFP is Apple Filing Protocol which is their file sharing protocol. The thing is that AFP according to this Wikipedia article was deprecated in macOS Mavericks on the client side, and Big Sur on the server side. Thus even though I can’t find documentation on this from Apple, I wonder if the setup wizard can’t see a NAS that only supports SMB. If that’s the case, that’s pretty dumb as Apple has said that AFP isn’t a thing anymore and SMB 3.0 which is Microsoft’s file sharing protocol being the default going forward. Apple really needs to bring some clarity to this as people like me abandoned AFP when I got wind that Apple wasn’t supporting it going forward.

This forced me to find a “plan B” to get her data across. That turned out to be using the Migration Assistant to do a peer-to-peer connection over my wireless network to get the data across. Not exactly the fastest method as I knew it would take about 3 to 4 hours to do in her case, but I knew it would work. Especially since both Macs were on Monterey. Though the new Mac required an update to Monterey 12.3.1 before the process could begin. So it was about 30 minutes for that, and three hours to transfer the data. But it worked. And my wife was then able to set up things like turn on iCloud which allowed me to turn on “Find My Mac“, set up Touch ID as well as Unlock with Apple Watch, and most importantly make sure that everything worked and all the data came across. I also ran a program called Silicon to make sure that as many apps as possible were updated to take advantage of Apple Silicon. Most were, though there were some that weren’t because they were Intel only apps with no Apple Silicon versions available, and one where I had to manually upgrade which was Zoom. For the record, Zoom for whatever reason not only doesn’t have a “universal” app that works both on Intel and Apple Silicon, but they make the Apple Silicon version insanely hard to find. Here’s a link to it should you need it. Finally, I had to reactivate Microsoft Office as that deactivates when you use the Migration Assistant. But at the end of all this, my wife has a working M1 Pro MacBook Pro that works.

Now you don’t make a transition like this without having a fall back plan. In this case I have two of them. The first is that I have moved my wife’s original Time Machine Backup to someplace else on the NAS so I can use that in the worst case scenario. Beyond that, I have taken her old MacBook Pro, shut it down and put it in a corner so that she can fall back to it if she has to. I’ve used this method with my clients and I have not once had to revert back to the old machine. A few times however I have had to fire up the old machine to get something that was missed during the data migration. But that tends to happen on the Windows side of the fence as I have never had to do that on a Mac because the Migration Assistant tends to be pretty thorough.

We’re going to give it two weeks and if there are no issues, we’re going to erase that Mac and take it into the Apple Store for recycling. Given its age, we do expect that we’ll also get some money back from it in the form of an Apple Gift Card. That way we don’t have to deal with trying to sell this on Craigslist as the value of Intel Macs aren’t what they used to be because of Apple Silicon. Plus by giving it to Apple, we know that it will be recycled properly.

So that covers my experience of transferring my wife’s data from her old MacBook Pro to her new one. If you have any questions about how I did this, please leave a comment below and I will do my best to answer it ASAP.

This entry was posted on May 16, 2022 at 9:40 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.