Because of unsolvable system errors (see Post-14.7 kernel panic ), I decided it was time to retire my 2018 Mac mini and replace it with a new M4 Mac mini.
The good news is that the migration was painless. I booted the new computer and pointed it at my Time Machine backup (made minutes prior), and it pretty much just worked. The system warned me that my backup was from a newer version of macOS than what was installed, but there was one button to click and it upgraded itself and then returned to the migration screen. After about 5 hours (migrating about 1TB of content from an HDD), the system completed the migration.
Interesting points, for others who need to go this route in the future:
The migration tool asks you for a new password for the administrator account. But for all other accounts, it presents and installs a random password. You’re expected to write this down (I photographed the screen) and give it to each user for his login.
I suppose this makes sense, since Apple may be unable to migrate the original passwords (I assume the hashes are salted and won’t work after migration), but I would have liked the ability to enter them myself from that screen, since I know all of my family’s preferred passwords.
I was, however, able to log in to the admin account after migration and use System settings to manually reset all those passwords to what they should be.
My installation of Emacs was incompatible. But it was easy to download a new build from GNU Emacs for Mac OS X.
Since this is a much newer version of Emacs than what I had been using, I’ll need to spend some time in the future cleaning up my preferences/config file. But it works.
Microsoft Office just worked. I did need to re-log-in to O365, but no real problems.
I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that my installation of FileMaker Pro 19 still works. It is a universal app, so there wasn’t even a need for Rosetta.
Photoshop Element 2021 (version 19) was the royal pain in my neck. It launched, but then asked me to log-in to my Adobe account. And wouldn’t proceed, even after authenticating. And my credentials are all fine - confirmed from the Adobe web site.
After some web searching, I learned that the answer is to download a new installer and run it. Then it asked for the same credentials, but afterward asked me for my serial number. Which was available from the Adobe web site. So I typed it in and it ran.
It is an Intel app, and macOS asked me to install Rosetta the first time I launched it, but it seems to be running.
My Silverfast scanner software also worked. Which didn’t surprise me too much, because I’ve been keeping it up to date over the years and it is a universal app.
What did surprise me is that its Adobe plugin worked. I assumed that since Photoshop Elements is Intel code and SilverFast is ARM (I assume, since it didn’t ask me about Rosetta) that it wouldn’t work. But it appears that the Intel plugin file simply launches the main SilverFast app with some kind of data-link between the two apps, so the architecture mismatch doesn’t seem to be an issue.
The act of launching/terminating SilverFast via that plugin is really slow, so it’s not perfect, but it works.
Does anyone know if Photoshop Element 2024 is Universal? Web searching seems to give inconclusive results. I’d prefer to buy a license key for 2024 (if I still can), because that one is perpetual. Starting with 2025, PSE licenses expire after 3 years and can not be renewed - some kind of brain-dead abomination of a subscription.
My installations of Chromium and Microsoft Edge wouldn’t run - wrong architecture. But it was trivial to download new builds. I had to manually remove the Quarantine attribute from the Chromium download, but I had already read enough to expect that.
I had to manually reinstall the XCode command-line tools because (as I’ve seen in the past), the migration lost the installation receipt, which MacPorts needs. But MacPorts’ error message included a URL to this page, and following the instructions there worked.
At first, I couldn’t print. I thought my old Brother drivers (long since deprecated) finally stopped working. But it looks like it’s the network protocol, not the drivers. When I reinstalled the printer using the AirPrint protocol and the same Brother driver that’s been migrated through countless upgrades, everything started printing again. If I tried to use the IPP protocol, then macOS can’t communicate. I don’t know why, but I’m not too bent out of shape over it.
My Apple SuperDrive continues to work. I needed a USB C-to-A adapter, but I was able to play a CD afterward. I’ll have to try burning a DVD to make sure that still works.
My 10-port USB3 hub had no problem (using another C-to-A adapter), so no need to re-cable my peripherals. I may decide to ditch the adapter and replace the hub’s cable with a C-to-B cable in order to remove an adapter but that’s low priority at this time.
I still have a lot of things to test, and I don’t think everything is going work smoothly, but all of the most important apps are running, which is most important at this time.
Good post. I’m sure you’re aware of the relevant issues, but if you won’t be keeping your 2018 mini, don’t forget to deactivate various licenses and sign out of various cloud services on it, including iCloud, Apple Messages, Apple Music, Microsoft 365, Adobe, and others.
Yep. I will be trading-in this computer. Apple offered $165 for it (i7 processor, 16GB RAM, 2TB storage) and included that link with the return package.
In a few days, after I’m sure I don’t need the old computer for anything, I’ll go take care of that. The built-in “Erase all content and settings” should remove it from the Find My network and log out from all Apple services.
I will make a point to log out from Microsoft Office and Photoshop Elements, but I’m pretty sure that I can do both from the company web sites (both are working fine from the new computer right now).
I thought that erase didn’t do that and you needed to do it separately. I always sign out of everything and deactivate Adobe licenses and such before nuking the old one.
It depends on the machine and the OS, at least regarding Apple services. You can use “Erase All Content and Settings” if you are running Monterey or newer on an Intel Mac with a T2 chip or an Apple Silicon Mac. If your system doesn’t meet those criteria, you need the more detailed procedure.
In either case, you still would need to deactivate or sign out of third party software tools that limit activations.
When I used MA to restore one Sequoia 15.4 backup onto a newly-installed 15.4 system, it did. It asked for a new administrator password and presented temporary passwords for all the other three accounts on the system.
FWIW, Microsoft 365 isn’t an issue - although they do limit the number of computers a single user can sign-in to, you can do a force-logout from the Microsoft web site.
If you have a perpetual license for Microsoft Office, you may need a new one. I think those are tied to a single computer (unless the terms have changed over the years), but MS customer support may be able to help you with a migration.
I don’t know about Adobe. I don’t use CC. My installation of Elements 2021 didn’t seem to complain when I activated it on the new Mac without (yet) signing out from the old one. But I did need to go through a full reinstall, so maybe the old one no longer works.
That must be new…the last time I used MA which was a year or so ago it required me to input new passwords for admin accounts so I just used the same one…but non admin accounts transferred over just fine.
It’s a welcome trend, especially as software requiring license management becomes more common. It’s certainly better than having to go back and forth with a company’s support team to reset licenses if an older machine is no longer available.
That said, if an app includes a license management command in its menus, it’s often easier and faster to use that rather than to mess around with websites, passwords, etc. Off the top of my head, some examples are iMazing, Snagit, MacUpdater, Parallels, and the various Omni apps.
(Part of why I remember some of them is that I forgot to deactivate them within the app before repurposing an old machine, and I realized that I spent more time engaging with support teams than if I had simply marched through the apps and used their own built-in deactivation commands. Yeah, maybe I have too many apps.)
If you have any purchased content, and a lot of computers, forgetting to de-authorize the Apple Account (for the Music app or the older iTunes app) can be a pain, because you are limited to five computers. And while Apple has a way to force a sign out from your account page, it signs all of the computers out, forcing them to reauthorize, rather than giving you a list to sign out of a particular computer. And, though this is less of a problem, if I remember right you can only do that once a year.
I’ve said before - I have a checklist I use when I get a new computer and that is first on the list for getting the old computer ready to erase (with a note “Don’t forget!” because I have, more than once.)
Just to note that when I migrated my Mac minis last year (January 2024) I had to do this as well - that was with Sonoma. After the new Mac came up I logged in to each account and reset the password.
I found that it also works to log in to the administrator account (using the password you created during migration) and then go to System Settings → Users & Groups, click on each user’s “i” icon and from there click the Pasword → Change… button.
Congratulations David! I migrated from a High Sierra Mac Pro 2010 to the base mini (1T storage I sprung for) back in December… for some reason when I did Migration Ass’t. (used CCC as my backup software, not TM) it missed copying my Pictures, Movies, Music over, but I manually copied them over. No surprises since then, so looks like everything else came over. Enjoy, it’s really a great little machine.
Mine were all in my user home folder. I used Ethernet for the transfer. I now have those folders/files on my Mini, my CCC Mini backup, a clone drive on my Mac Pro & the boot drive from there AND on 2 tiny 256G flash drives to boot!
That worked, but I noticed a few unexpected things:
The sytem-erase tool requires you to set the Secure boot mode to “Full Security”. I’m not sure why it should matter, but it does.
You have to be logged in as an administrator to run the tool. You can’t just provide the admin account and password from a normal user-login.
I manually logged out from my Apple ID from my user-account. From the admin account, the Mac asked me for my Apple ID password, but wouldn’t accept it. I had to manually log it out from the admin account as well. Then it worked without asking.
The final reboot presented an error of some kind and then dropped me back into Recovery mode. But then I just told it to reboot (from the Apple menu) and it went where it was supposed to - the Sequoia set-up-new-system screen.
I suspect this is related to the unknown (hardware?) issue that made me decide to replace that computer.
Interesting. I suspect you are right. The handful of times I’ve used “Erase All Content and Settings”, it worked without complication.
Apple doesn’t seem to be selling refurbished Intel-based Mac minis from its online store at the moment. I imagine they’ll just recycle your apparently faulty unit rather than refurbish it. I do wonder if your mini would have made it through Apple’s certified refurbishing process if you had traded it in a couple of years ago.
I hope not. That’s the reason I’m trading it in instead of trying to sell it - it would be highly unethical to sell a flaky system to someone else.
If the problem is what I suspect, then refurbishment would involve replacing the flash-memory chips and maybe clean reinstall of the T2 firmware. Something Apple can do, but would be too expensive for anyone else to bother with.
Of course, if it wasn’t flaky, I wouldn’t have replaced it. My prior Macs (2011 mini and 2002 PowerMac) were used long past the point where their trade-in value dropped to zero. And I still have them in my closet, in case they might be useful in the future for something. (I may set up the PowerMac in the future, in order to run a lot of my old games. And maybe downgrade it to Mac OS X 10.4 in order to get back my Classic environment.)
Agreed. I suppose one of the main reasons to get a refurbished unit from Apple in particular is that even if a lemon slips through the cracks of Apple’s certification process, it would come with a trustworthy warranty.
Since you mentioned your PowerPC Mac, just a few days ago I needed to track down an old utility, which led me to a couple of PowerBooks in the closet. I was delighted with how both immediately powered up and ran, despite being 20-30 years old. Unfortunately, while in storage, the screen on my beloved old PowerBook 1400cs started to suffer from delamination of its polarizer film, aka “vinegar syndrome.” It could be an interesting repair project, but realistically, it would be hard to justify the time for it.
