The Studio Display finally arrived to pair with the Mac Studio that’s been sitting waiting for it for several weeks now. Some notes:
(1) Wow. This is nice.
(2) Back when the Mac Studio first arrived, I tried to set it up using an old Dell monitor that was lying around and using Setup Assistant via Ethernet from my old iMac (running High Sierra). Several hours in, the process slowed to a crawl and then halted. At that time I also realized that the old monitor was too small for me to comfortably do my job from, so I decided to just wait on the Studio Display. In the interim, I took the USB external drive I had gotten to be my new Time Machine drive, hooked it up to the old iMac, and made a SuperDuper copy.
Yesterday I made a final update to the SuperDuper copy. I did a factory reset on the Mac Studio to get rid of my old partial migration and then pointed Migration Assistant to the external drive. It ran flawlessly in about 3 hours. Clearly the extra time spent copying the old machine’s drive was worth it. (I couldn’t use the old machine’s Time Machine drive easily because it was a FW 800 drive.)
(3) One oddity — there were a number of App Store apps, including Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, where updates had long ago stopped supporting High Sierra. None of these showed in the update screen of the App Store. To get them updated, I had to go to each app’s individual page, where there would be an “Update” button. (In the purchased app list, and in the search results, the button was “Open”, which I’d expect if the app was up to date. But on the individual app page, the button said “Update” and worked to update the app.)
(4) One thing I’ve found missing from various migration guides is any instruction on what needs to be signed out of, inactivated, de-authorized, etc. on the old computer after the new machine is running. I forgot to disable BackBlaze, but I should be able to disconnect the old Mac from the internet and uninstall BackBlaze before I get into trouble.
Is there any other list of things that should be shut off or disabled on the old machine? My plan is to set it aside for a few weeks just in case, then eventually wipe it and get rid of it.
The ones I forgot about when I got a new computer was Microsoft, Drive Genius, and if you have any music software. BackBlaze backup can be “inherited” and they have some help on their site. Some photography software has to be unlicensed, and then turned back on. Find my Mac and sign out of iTunes, though that can be reset if needed.
Apple only allows five computers (Macs and PCs running iTunes) to be authorized to play DRM-protected content (movies, streaming music and older music purchases). If you hit the limit and want to authorize a new computer, you need to deauthorize some other computer.
If you don’t have access to any computer you want to deauthorize, you can log in to your account and do a “deauthorize all”, but that’s a pain because you then need to manually re-authorize the Macs you’re still using.
Also a pain because you can only do it once a year. I just hit this a few weeks ago when I realized I forgot to deauthorize a computer and I was already at 5 when I tried to activate the new one.
Thanks! I think I got everything disabled/deauthorized on my old machine. I’m going to let it sit for a couple of weeks before I go ahead and wipe it. A few additional notes.
(1) Something I wasted too much time/effort thinking about: last night when I went to take apart the old computer, I found that my Time Machine drive–which had been connected via FW800–actually had a USB 3 port on the back as well. I may just re-connect that drive to the new machine and continue using it for Time Machine.
(2) I primarily use 1Password, but had been leaving iCloud/Safari passwords enabled. Somehow in Monterey, when I have a form field, the Apple pop-up covers most of the 1Password pop-up, so I’m probably going to have to turn the Apple one off completely.
(3) I’m not sure if this is something that’s going to continue, but an awful lot of applications on first launch require me to provide additional authorization for them to access “Removable Volumes”. I assume this has to do with the fact that I have an external drive attached. Is there any way to quiet this particular query?
(4) I use ImageCapture to do a lot of scanning. So far in Monterey it seems to forget my window size and revert to a default that’s quite small every time I launch the application. Is this just a bug, or am I missing some way to set the default size of the window?
If you use Adobe CC, sign out of that. I think it is less bad than it used to be, but it used to be a tech-support nightmare if you wiped a Mac before de-authorizing your Adobe apps.
