So I went all in, almost, and ordered a refurb 1.2 GHz i7 with 16GB RAM and 1TB drive. Arrived noon Thursday, 18 hours after the order was placed.
I tried migrating from my year old iMac Pro to the new laptop and it was a disaster. I used migration assistant to migrate just a single account and network settings, no files, no apps and it says its gonna take an hour. I come back an hour later and it is stalled at 15 minutes to go. Waited 30 minutes, and started over using a thunderbolt connection. Says 30 minutes to go. So I grab a cup of coffee and come back in 30 minute and the fans were spinning full blast, it was toasty, and stalled with 5 minutes to go. So I gave up and just set it up as a new mac. That worked fine, but since it wouldn’t let me set up the same user and it seems many of the settings were either taken from my apple account or were left over from the failed migration attempt, I probably should wipe it and start over. It is also failing Numbers/Garageband/Keynote/Pages updates. One time I noticed it mentioned something like invalid hardware. Others update just fine. I’ve set up dozens of MACs over the years and recall only one or two migration nightmares.
I’m coming from a trusty loaded early 2014 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro 2.6GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7 and a recent iPad Pro. This laptop is running quite warm at idle, uncomfortable on the lap when working hard, in comparison to the MacPro. Between the fans blaring during migration and this heat I’m wondering if this unit may be one that was returned for running too hot which they cleaned up and resold. Perhaps I just need a little patience.
Anyway I’ll post about temperatures in the heat thread.