Upgrade to new MBP. USB-C to transfer? Intel to Apple Silicon

[twanj]

My new MBP is coming tomorrow and what I remember from my last upgrade in 2019 was that it was wireless and slow.

Can I use USB-C/Thunderbolt cable to speed things up?

How does it work transferring from Intel to Apple Silicon? Does everything carry over then I have to re-install Apple Silicon versions of some apps (Chrome, Spotify, VLC)? I assume all the Apple apps will be native from the App Store (Pages, iMovie, etc).

 

[fisherking]

easiest perhaps to migrate from a time machine backup. you can select what you want to copy over.

if it were me, i'd NOT migrate apps, but do clean installs of all 3rd-party programs; this way, you can make sure you're installing the silicon versions (if they exist).

otherwise, you'll be prompted to install rosetta2 to open intel apps... but that works just fine.

i just did a migration last week, from a TM backup (no apps, but everything else). straightforward & simple.

 

[twanj]

Interesting, thanks!

I've never done a time machine restore.

 

[fisherking]

plug in your TM drive (backup your 'old' mac just before this) to your new mac. open the lid, follow the prompts to migrate everything (again, you could skip 'applications' and do clean installs).... have fun! and this community is. of course, always here if you need help (and apple is a call away any time)

 

[Fishrrman]

The migration will probably go better from an external backup drive.
If you have one, try that first.

 

[twanj]

I'm seeing you can use Migration Assistant (prolly what I used before) and can use a Thunderbolt cable.

Any reason to not use this?

 

[twanj]

I ended up using Migration Assistant with a Thunderbolt cable. It claimed it was getting speeds of 1.7GB/sec...

I transferred everything from my old MBP (1 TB) and it took about 15 min. Not bad!

Most of my apps were migrated to Apple Silicon versions like Chrome.

I uninstalled and downloaded VLC and Spotify. These now show as iOS instead of Apple Silicon or Universal Binary.

 

[twanj]

Final (?) followup: my Chrome extensions didn't carry over. So I had to turn on sync.

 

[Miles Fu]

I ended up using Migration Assistant with a Thunderbolt cable. It claimed it was getting speeds of 1.7GB/sec...

I transferred everything from my old MBP (1 TB) and it took about 15 min. Not bad!

Most of my apps were migrated to Apple Silicon versions like Chrome.

I uninstalled and downloaded VLC and Spotify. These now show as iOS instead of Apple Silicon or Universal Binary.

1.7GB/S, pretty fast!

 

[twanj]

1.7GB/S, pretty fast!

I was impressed!

Last time I'd used wifi and was waiting forever to use my new MBP! I feel like it was 2.5-4 hours!

Huge improvement!