My 27inch iMac is around 12 years old and still works quite well.
I only need to reboot it every six months or so and the main functions still work fine. However, it has a case of creeping obsolescence. I usually like that Mac systems will go to a certain point and then stop accepting the next twiddles and updates. It means the systems stay stable and run well, although some of the whizzier new things won't ever work.
By contrast my Windows systems would last about 3 years after which point they would have so many new features that they progressively ground to a halt. Drivers? Registry? All of that kind of stuff. And yes I knew how to rescue-edit the registry back in the day.
Now I've been faced with the inevitable decision to update my Entire Desktop system.
I know...Desktops! Sounds a bit like land-lines. We are supposed to be able to do everything on a smartphone nowadays. That's okay for consumers, but not the case for creators. We still need keyboards and BIG screens.
So I took the plunge and ran MacOS Migration Assistant, with a new pristine Machine connected to my trusty iMac with a piece of ethernet cable and then with another ethernet connected by an old thunderbolt back to the main network.
I managed to get about 133MB/s from this which still meant that transferring 3,300,000 or so files took over a day. If I'd been more thoughtful I'd have found an old Thunderbolt to new Thunderbolt cable but the Ethernet Cat 8 seemed to work fine. No checkpointing so it was a huge act of faith that it would all work.
And yes, it did.
At around 3 in the morning of day two I checked the machines which confirmed they had run to completion. I fired up the replacement machine and was pleased to see my entire desktop and directories of apps had transferred across. I was genuinely impressed. Most stuff just worked straight away.
Then a few tweaks because of a Wacom tablet error and the need to reinstate Dropbox - which took about 2 minutes. I was worried about Microsoft Office - no need to be and my extensive Adobe collection which have been progressively freezing as un-updateable.
I seemed to have a tragic amount of emails but the new system blasted through re-indexing them so quickly that I just assume I can still find anything.
Now, everything is back and I get to use the AI capabilities as well. I've an ever increasing collection of AI instances now and spent a few minutes speccing the new machine to have enough neural network processing. Like we used to do with c[us, then memory, then disks, then graphics.
Anyhoo. It all seems to work. So far! And the still respectable iMac can go into the music room.
