I did it! I was eligible for a work computer upgrade last summer, but was able to wait it out until I could get the 16" MacBook Pro instead of the older 15".
It’s been a long time since I’ve moved to a new computer.
What would team MPU recommend as far as moving data over vs starting with a fresh machine?
Also, are apps like Fruit Juice still helpful for prolonging battery life? I want to take care of this thing from the start.
What about good ways to help alleviate the misery of living in dongletown? This will be my first foray into USB C.
I can say two things on this (well my opinion that is)
Fruitjuice is useless af far as battery health goes, no need to calibrate etc…
Start fresh: i had problems updating my 2016 MBP to catalina and started fresh. It took a couple of hours to get back to almost full operativity (YMMV, depend on the setup), and got rid of a lot of cruft and never used app in the process; I’d not do it every year but with a new Mac after a while it’s worth it
Just went to the new 16" from a 2011-or-so 15" that had been through many upgrade iterations, in fact dating back to a 2004 iBook. I decided it was time for a fresh install. There are enough significant changes (no 32-bit apps) in Catalina that it seemed like the best approach.
And regarding Dongletown, I bought one of these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FX2LW35/
For $38 it gives me back the old USB ports, SD card reader, and Ethernet ports that were taken away and gives me a HDMI. Solves all my connectivity in one neat little box.
My advice for living in Dongletown is to replace cables as you need them. I do have one VAVA adapter from Amazon which has 3 USB A ports, Ethernet, and an SD card reader. I use it as power pass through and Ethernet on my Air when podcasting.
I have been moving into a new MBP 16 myself over the past several weeks. I decided to take it slow and not hurry things along. If I run into something that is missing – e.g., a folder of custom DEVONthink scripts that I wanted to use in the fresh install of DEVONthink on my new machine – I plug in an external SSD that contains a clone of the old machine, find the data, and copy the data over.
In the process of moving I’ve abandoned lots of applications I hardly used, and a lot of cruft. The old and new machines are both 1TB SSDs, and through the moving process I have ended up with a significant amount of more free space on the new machine than on the old. My old machine was the end point of a long chain of OS X/macOS upgrades and migration assistant migrations from previous machines. By breaking the chain and starting over by building the new machine from scratch, I have a sprightly and slimmed down user account to work from, which is great.
I also used the Catalina 32-bit app abandonment as a reason to start over with a fresh machine.
Over a period of a few weeks, I only moved over applications that I actually use. No real problems, though some programs are wonky with their “deactivate your old install before installing a new one” routines (they’re never quite the same.)
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