I had been dragging my feet about upgrading to a newer MacBook Pro. (MBPro)

There were several reasons besides the obvious one, the cost.

My big beef is the new line of MBPros have become less and less ‘green’ as it were.

None of its interior parts are user replaceable.

Not the RAM, the hard drive or the battery.

Understandably this change makes many longtime Mac users a little nervous.

If there’s ever a problem, it has to go back to Apple for repair.

That means AppleCare warranty is a must.

Computer users, especially Mac owners, tend to hang on to their machines longer than their Windows counterparts, so their hard drives usually fill fast and they often will upgrade the stock hard drive either on their own or by sending it out.

This is no longer an option with the shift to all the partsbeing soldered to the motherboard.

Only time will tell if I change my tune.

So my  latest MBPro which I bought off eBay using the time tested art of sniping with 5 seconds to spare has the following specifications:

• Mavericks OS 10.9.1
• 2.7 GHz Intel core i7
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB
• 750GB SSD drive
• 16GB RAM

The very anal side of me which is often prone to buyers’ remorse has been pricing the same exact machine and I can honestly say I scored a very good deal for what I paid.

The machine even has AppleCare till July 2015.

Migrating my files or data

“Moving to a new house” can sometimes cause anxiety because don’t we all dread hunting for all those super long serial numbers needed for installation of applications?

Then there’s the possibility that after going through the marathon installation session and updates, things may break and stop working.

This time around, I decided to give Migration Assistant  found under (Application>Utilities) a try instead of installing every application manually.

My previous MBPro was the very last model with a user swappable battery before the unibody form factor.

It had Firewire 800 and USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet for hardwiring to a router or cable modem.

My new baby has 2 USB 3.0 ports, 2 Thunderbolt,1  HDMI and that was it.

I contemplated connecting via USB 2.0 to do the migration but decided  that was going to be painfully slow and I needed an adapter to convert FW800 to Thunderbolt.

That cable was $35 on eBay but it effectively cut the task by half the time.

Procedure

Grab both power cords for the MBookPros and plug them both in since this will take a couple of hours depending on how much data you have to move.

Then  set the the old MBPro on the left and the new MBPro on the right so the ports are facing one another.

After attaching the Thunderbolt adapter to the FW800 cable, connect the two MBPros.

On the older MBPro, restart the computer while holding down the “t” key.

When it finally boots, the screen will flash the Firewire icon which moves all around the screen probably to prevent the image from burning in.

On the new MBPro, launch Migration Assistant and follow the prompts.

Lessons Learned

Always expect to spend more money after upgrading. In my case, I needed to purchase a FW800 adapter to Thunderbolt or else I would have to be contented with transfer speeds of USB 2.0.

At this point, it’s too early to tell what applications are broken.

So far the important ones, Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 5, Final Cut Pro X are working fine, so I’m a happy camper.

What did you guys get over the holiday season? Please let me know via comments.