I did the manual migration from El Capitan and a 13 year old Mac Pro to a brand new M1 MacBook Pro (until the new iMac is out). It takes some time but is not that hard. All the iCloud stuff and Contacts, Calendars, passwords etc come over automatically. Transferring documents is easy. Transferring Mail requires some thinking. I copied the old Mail folder over and then imported each of my old Mail boxes. I had a lot of Mail rules. So I opened the new Mail rules plist file, studied how it saved the few existing rules, and then copy pasted the old Mail rules plist content. Don’t forget to fix any path and mail folder names if necessary. Document aliases resolved fine (I was surprised). Transferring Photo library did not work at the first try. I mostly use referenced photos. It found most but not all photos automatically but then never completed Face detection. In the end I just started over and reimported my photos. Transferring Music and TV shows/movies was fine if you keep the location of the files in the correct place, which now is different from Mojave. Apps need to be reinstalled but you want the latest M1 version anyway and I had to contact a few guys to resend me new serial numbers for registration. And you need to find and copy anything special in ~User/Library etc. Overall it took me a week by doing it slowly every day a bit. Backups need to be set up new of course. Keep the old computer around for a while so you can always go back and look for something you forgot to copy over.
That sounds hard to me. :)
What was wrong with just migrating using Time Machine? It takes a few hours, is basically complete, and then you’re done with it.
Moving from El Capitan to Monterey is a big step and I did not want to transfer 13 years of accumulated stuff/junk/leftover crap. I wanted a fresh clean install with only the apps I still use.
Not trying to be snarky – I am legitimately curious – what is the benefit of getting rid of all that “crap”? Has anyone ever documented it causing any issues?
AFAIK, the OS upgrade will remove any obsolete system software/incompatible extensions, and if there’s an app you don’t use, its preferences and system files won’t interfere with anything. At one time (decades ago) the space they used could be significant, but now it amounts to a few megabytes, which is nothing.
If you just want to be clean and organized, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think there’s any practical advantage except a tiny bit of disk space gained.
I find a clean install way more hassle as it takes me days to set up the “new” system exactly the way I want – so many little settings I forget until I run into them and they annoy me. I don’t see any purpose.
My M1 Max arrived, a college supplied laptop with all that entails in terms of remote management profiles etc. Sigh.
Given that it’s not my machine, I’m not migrating, I’m going to install certain apps only. I’m trying to identify what aspects of my work I can slice off and put on this machine for teaching purposes, a task I am finding difficult I have to say and I suspect a certain amount of creep will be inevitable.
The Geekbench scores show it as about five times faster, single core and multi-core, than my 2019 i7 iMac.
This is not actually true. I just migrated from High Sierra to Monterey in a Macbook Pro Max. Since the old computer was a 2010-vintage Mac Pro, my connection options turned out to be extremely limited (ethernet), so the migration went very slowly. I tried to use Migration Assistant to move everything, wanting to keep my 20+ years of email and files. The settings were transferred using ethernet, but when I checked the data folders, I found that a large amount, around a terabyte, worth of the files hadn’t transferred. Thankfully, I found that the Apple silicon has something akin to Target Disk, so I was able to use USB2 connection, which was faster than ethernet but not by much. I found that a lot of programs were transferred, including a lot that aren’t usable in the new laptop. I ended up upgrading and deleting the ones that I no longer needed or were not upgraded.
Everything that @xdev had to say in the second paragraph is very close to being 100% true. Migration Assistant does attempt to only migrate System software and extensions that are known to be compatible with the new macOS and skip items that are on it’s list of known incompatibilities.
But he said nothing about those 3rd party apps you had to dispose of. That isn’t a function of Migration Assistant in any way. As you found out, that’s up to the user to sort out, either before hand or as you found out after the fact.
There are some tools which make this easier that I would have recommended if I was aware of what you were going to do. I suspect most of the apps that no longer worked were because they were coded as 32-bits, none of which would have worked if you had chosen to stop at Catalina, instead. There are tools that would have alerted you to those. And Application Compatibility Table — RoaringApps is a crowd sourced site that can alert you to apps that are suppose to work, not work or are unknown in a variety of recent OSs.
That’s just it, not all of them were 3rd party apps. I completely expected that the older 3rd party apps wouldn’t work even if they got migrated over, but I was surprised when something like the 2009 edition of iDVD, among a few others, made it across. Don’t misunderstand, the migration of these apps wasn’t really a problem in my eyes. Ultimately, I don’t have many special needs, so the older apps that I cannot use anymore aren’t a major issue. Additionally, since I was migrating from such an out-of-date OS, I wasn’t surprised by any of the problems. That said, the troubling aspect of the transfer was the incomplete transfer of around a terabyte of data from standard folders (Documents, Movies, Music). For some reason, the permissions on the new machine prevented data files from transferring, even though the folders were all properly created. It took a few tries to figure out that there was a permissions issue, and by then I had started doing the transfer manually.
Had I kept up with new OS’s over the years, I’m confident that the migration problems would have been few if any. The MacBook is new and fast, so I’ll be keeping up with them for the foreseeable future.