MP 1,1-5,1 Are OS installs machine-specific?

[mattspace]

I recall back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the land, a MacOS install would be specific to the machine you were installing it on - there was even an option to install the OS specifically for the current mac, or a universal install that could power any mac.

Is that still a thing - ie could I pull my High Sierra Mac Pro drive out and put it in a Mac Mini (the one with the removable ram and opening plastic bottom), and boot it and go about my day with my operating environment intact (iCloud login and machine name being changed for the new hardware) so I can move my Mac Pro onto new things?

Or is it easier to just to a migration assistant, and slurp everything across, including all my funky old Adobe CS5 apps etc?

Physically moving the drive isn't the difficult part of the process from my perspective.

 

[tsialex]

I recall back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the land, a MacOS install would be specific to the machine you were installing it on - there was even an option to install the OS specifically for the current mac, or a universal install that could power any mac.

Not since Apple started with Mac App Store. Only the old Restore CDs/DVDs are machine specific.

Is that still a thing - ie could I pull my High Sierra Mac Pro drive out and put it in a Mac Mini (the one with the removable ram and opening plastic bottom),

You can do it for most Macs, but some initialise the disk in different ways. Also FV2 has issues with moving the disk to a different Mac.

and boot it and go about my day with my operating environment intact (iCloud login and machine name being changed for the new hardware) so I can move my Mac Pro onto new things?

No, the moment you move the disk from one Mac to the other, even within the exact same Mac model, iCloud/Messages/FaceTime stop working and will need a new authentication process.

Or is it easier to just to a migration assistant, and slurp everything across, including all my funky old Adobe CS5 apps etc?

Physically moving the drive isn't the difficult part of the process from my perspective.

Depends, any apps that are tied to the SSN/MLB or any hardware IDs will need to be authorised again. There are other issues like networking/BT and let's not forget the Finder icons that will be wrong, but this is not a problem except for OCD people.

I personally hate doing that and I always re-install from scratch all my Apps/environment when upgrading to a new Mac. It's the perfect excuse to trim things that I installed for one specific use case and will hardly use it again and etc.

 

[chrfr]

Is that still a thing - ie could I pull my High Sierra Mac Pro drive out and put it in a Mac Mini (the one with the removable ram and opening plastic bottom), and boot it and go about my day with my operating environment intact (iCloud login and machine name being changed for the new hardware) so I can move my Mac Pro onto new things?

If you're not using a 2.5" drive in the Mac Pro, the disk won't physically fit inside a mini.

 

[haralds]

It looks like now you even have to re-authenticate with iCloud when you boot from two different disks or Volumes - like Ventura and Monterey.