How lazy can I be?

November 12, 2020 11:33 AM

Thanks to a family member's generosity, I'm getting a new MacBook Pro running Catalina. Do I need to update my current late 2013 MBP, running High Sierra 10.13.6 (I know, I know) before transferring?

I know there may be some programs I can't use anymore due to their being 32-bit, so that's not the question. What I'm wondering is whether having the whole old laptop running High Sierra is going to cause problems when I use Migration Assistant to move stuff onto the new laptop. Do I need to update it first? Is there anything else I should do to make a smooth transition? (And--in terms of transferring my music library--are bad things going to happen to my mp3s when I have to stop using iTunes and start using Music?)

posted by wintersweet to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: Yeah, I literally just did this a few days ago, from High Sierra to Catalina, and was hoping the same thing. But no dice; I had to do the updates. It wouldn't work (Migration Assistant would just disappear after logging me out on each of the two connected computers) until I waited hours for incremental updates to High Sierra to download and install, then Catalina to download and install, then updates to Catalina to download and install. Start ahead of time and just get the old one updated to Catalina as soon as you can.

Also, so far so good on Music. I don't like the interface as much, but it certainly works just fine, and everything in my library transferred over great.
posted by limeonaire at 12:00 PM on November 12, 2020

You want to update before you transfer, even if they didn't make you. It's hard enough to transfer everything from one computer to another without making it work on dozens of different OS versions. If you were really desperate you could restore from your High Sierra Time Machine backups afterwards, but I'd only do that if you have treasured software that you need to run.

Music is not really a different application. There's a lot of talk about eliminating iTunes, but the basic mechanism is the same.
posted by wnissen at 12:57 PM on November 12, 2020

If all you’re transferring is files and selected apps, you won’t need to update the old laptop.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:42 PM on November 12, 2020

Response by poster: In case anyone else is reading this later: my partner went ahead and tried Migration Assistant from his old laptop that was running Mavericks. It worked with no problems (I mean, it took a looong time to transfer data, but it worked). I tried it on my High Sierra computer the next day, and Migration Assistant had no problems. Didn't take too long to do, either. I'll definitely clean up some old programs I won't be using anymore, but everything else runs fine. As far as I can tell, the fact that we hadn't updated our OSes didn't matter at all.

The only hiccups were 1) Chrome, which decided to forget all my tabs (Firefox had no issues), and 2) Backblaze, but that's just because it freaked out when it was suddenly running on 2 computers. I looked up the instructions for fixing it and now it's working normally.

(Yay new computer!)
posted by wintersweet at 8:37 PM on December 4, 2020 [1 favorite]