I am helping my brother-in-law migrate to his new M4 Max 14" MacBook Pro. My first thought was to migrate from a Carbon Copy Clone of his 2013 MacBook Pro. Other options are a Time Machine backup, Target Disk mode connected with a hub, wifi suggested by Apple Support YouTube video, or Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 5 via a hub.
Any advantages to one of the other options?
Thanks in advance,
Doug
In general, I would prefer a direct connection (not involving a hub) to the fastest drive holding a backup for a migration.
I’ve migrated via wifi, a clone, and Ethernet with file sharing. Strangely enough WiFi wasn’t actually that slow. However…since migrating from a 20 Intel machine…a lot of the apps are either not going to be 32 bit or otherwise might not run/be the latest update. I would transfer any home directories only to the new machine…then create the associated same named user accounts and tell Sequoia to use the existing named home…that will get the permissions fixed right. Apps…reinstall the current version of whatever he needs as well…don’t move all the cruft over.
I just received my new MacBook Pro M4 and migrated from my MacBook Pro M1. I used Migration Assistant and a short Thunderbolt cable (that came with my SSD drive). Migration Assistant gives the choice of Wi-Fi, network, and Direct. During the migration, it gives the option to see the comparative rates (it tests and uses the fastest). In my case, the direct connect transfer rate was over 100 times higher (approx. 1700 MB/s direct vs. 15 MB/s Wi-Fi). I transferred over 700 GB of data in less than an hour – I can’t say precisely because I wasn’t watching the transfer and thought it would take much longer.
Based on my experience, I will definitely use direct connect in the future.
Very similar to @jimblock I opted to use a short TB4 cable to go from my old M1P my new M4P 14" too since I expected highest throughput from that.
I wasn’t around to follow the details, but when I came back after a while it had transferred all ~300 GB and claimed it had done so over wifi. Now my home wifi is fast (~500 Mbps over final gen AirPort Extreme) but I doubt it’s that fast.
I never really understood what my options are and although MA insisted on connecting to a wifi, it never explicitly asked me if I wanted to make use of the direct TB4 connection. I know it’s a quality cable because I use it to run 3.2 GB/s data to/from a fast external NVMe SSD all the time. I also know it recognized the TB4 cable connection because the new Mac later showed it had a TB4-based Gigabit interface defined in its network settings.
There has been some debate as to what type of connections MA supports. It has been claimed that MA on initial setup does not offer the same options as MA on top of an existing installation. But various sources seem to contradict each other and Apple’s documentation is vague. Clear as mud. 
I have no complaints about the process really. It would be nice if users could force a certain transfer mode, but that’s not usually the way Apple likes to do things.
If I’d want to be 100% sure I’ll be transferring at the maximum speed possible, next time I’ll just connect my old Mac’s final TM backup via TB4 to the new Mac and migrate from that. Should migrate just the same as direct Mac to Mac, but the 40 Gbps of TB4 will certainly beat out the 0.5 Gbps of my wifi. Obviously if your TM backup is on a slow HDD (1 Gbps) the conduit or protocol isn’t the bottleneck and you’d be better off going direct from old to new Mac over whatever MA chooses.
Thanks for the responses. The source computer didn’t have any 32-bit apps at this point.
I decided to check the Carbon Copy Cloner website for its take on migrating and was happy to find a writeup on this webpage:
https://bombich.com/en/kb/ccc/6/i-want-clone-my-entire-hard-drive-new-hard-drive-or-new-machine
It seemed very straightforward and I thought the data in the CCC clone would be in a simpler form than the data on the Time Machine backup.
We erased the SSD clone and did a full clone with no safety net or snapshots to include the latest operating system from the older machine - it took about 10 minutes. We then attached the clone to the new computer - it is usb-c SanDisk with an adapter for usb-a. The migration was also quick - maybe 20 minutes with no issues, so we are happy campers.
Good to hear. The depth and breadth of Bombich’s support for CCC users is one of the main reasons I continue to use CCC despite Apple making it essentially impossible to clone disks now.
Any major advantage to using CCC rather than SuperDuper? I’ve used SD for years and am happy with it. Also, interesting comment about Apple “making it essentially impossible to clone disks now.” Seems like Apple closes more doors with every “upgrade.”
Unfortunately, a necessary side effect of making it difficult to corrupt a working system installation is that you can’t use third-party tools to clone such an installation. Otherwise, a tool could (whether deliberately or via a bug) create a corrupted clone.
Personally, I don’t think this extreme level of security is required for most people, but that’s a separate discussion.
Generally speaking, CCC and SuperDuper are both highly regarded. My feeling is that CCC is somewhat more of a power user tool, whereas SuperDuper is more about set-and-forget backups.
Thank you, Adam! Being old, I’m good with set-and-forget. 