How to MOVE from an INTEL Mac to a M1 Mac 

We hope this helps! Its not an exciting video today, but its a helpful one!

Just FYI, if you have a lot of videos (like I do) store the ones not used frequently on an external drive, it reduces your transfer speed with a lot and you can just reload them on the new computer from the external drive a lot faster once the new machine is setup. It also frees up a lot of internal drive space if videos are on an external drive. Thanks for this video, I am also thinking about moving to the new M1.

Thank youuu so much for the vid!!! Migration been stuck at 15 mins for about an hour so I’m just gonna go to bed, I’m finally upgrading to the M1 pro after 6 beautiful years with my first early 2015 Macbook pro!! SO EXCITED!!!!

Time-saving tip... if both machines have thunderbolt / USB-C ports like the laptops did in the video, you can connect a cable from the ports on one Mac to the other. I moved 495 GB of data from my old MBP to my new MBP in 16 minutes! Simply hook the cable up before the machines find each other in Migration Assistant. Much faster.

Very helpful, particularly because I wasn't even sure if this is possible. Although I'm not an owner of a new Mac yet, I now know that I have nothing to fear once I'll get a newer modell.

thank you for showing the actual screens...wasn't sure at some points when you could hit continue

Thank you for this! First time upgrading my Mac so this here was exactly what I needed!

Is it better to connect the two machines with a TB cable or use a TM backup?

very helpful, thanks! i did migration shortly BEFORE watching your video (lol) but so far did everything right.

If you have a 2011 iMac running High Sierra and a new Mac Mini M1, can you still transfer your files and apps even thought the old OS is very old?

Other Mac users who transfer data and apps from Intel Mac to newer M1 Macs have reported lots of problems because Apple's buggy Migration Assistant will copy intel code apps over to the M1 Mac, which either doesn't work at all or generates lots of bugs. Other users avoid using WiFi as the transfer link and use ethernet or Thunderbolt wired links, because the WiFi router has small memory buffers which saturate and both slow transfers to a crawl and can corrupt them. This video should have recommended wired links NOT WiFi in the first place.

Every little bit helps !

Try using a thunderbolt cable....100x faster. I made the mistake of using wireless connection and it too hours while the cable took minutes.

life saver man!

nicely done man!

How did all the ilok stuff transfer over: waves/ izotope? Was it an easy transfer for something like Logic Pro x? Thanks man! Great video!

How do I stop the old operating system from transferring to the new M1 Mac?

Thank you so much for this video! It helped a lot !!!

Can't speak for Intel to M1, but migrating from m1 to m3 using the Thunderbolt cable was by far the fastest and easiest.

This gives me a good idea… I’ve got a Mac studio coming this month and I’ve got about 450gigs of data on my old Mac mini. I have an external drive so I could put most of my files onto it and then do migration on everything else and just put folders back. Will be much faster.

Great video - just what I needed.

Hi, I have 2 questions about the process: - Does the Mac have to be using Wifi or can one of the 2 use a wired connection? - Does it have to be on the same version of MacOS or can I do a back up per example from Monterrey or Ventura to Sonoma?

I did transfer 744GB of data from 13inch to 14inch wired and it took within 40 minutes. Usb c to usb C

Many thanks for a very informative video. I went through this process with an M2 Mac Book Pro 2022 and my Intel i5 Mac Book Pro 2020 which I had spilt fizzy pop over the keyboard having fallen asleep at my desk. I have now fixed the intel based MBP (which took a lot of patience and the right tools which thankfully I had to hand) and used the migration assistant to move all of my files settings etc. to my new M2 (So cool) MBP. However I assumed (assumption being the mother of all F ups) that during migration it would ask if I wanted to migrate my bootcamp files as I had a windows partition (I am a software developer so need both really - guess I will just have to use my vms housed with my DC provider now). I knew I couldn't actually use windows, it being an ARM based processor, and so didn't want to transfer the whole windows system drive plus everything else on my windows bootable drive. However, it didn't ask (I suppose I should have looked it up online first... doh) and the files have all been moved across and sit under the 'Other User' category when I go and look at the computer properties within the top left apple logo menu. I have not found anything online that informs me how I move these files to an external drive to use to boot a windows machine from. I am only really concerned with moving the folders in Mactintosh HD onto the external drive then deleting them from my new MBP to free up the additional space (its taking up 90Gb which is annoying on a brand new machine that I have no use for the files). The trouble is it is not immediately evident which parent folder all of this data sits under. Any help gratefully received. Kind regards. Tom

Transferred from Mac intel to m3 and went to download a text editor and it defaulted to python 3.9.6 - the native version of the Intel Mac. Rm -rf a ton of things on old Mac and reset the new Mac before this..

I was watching because I migrated all my data from my Intel mac to my new Studio M1, and I'm having Finder issues. I asked our company IT guy and he said the architecture is different and it's best to manually move everything over and I'm just now about to wipe the M1 and try to do a manual clean install. It's been about a year and it hasn't resolved. I was hoping there would be a hybrid method.

Is this possible with Mojave OS? Thank you for this video. Pure gold.

I have followed the steps several times and when I get to the place to create a new secure password for the admin account it is "grayed out" and I can not Continue. Any ideas what is going on?

Thank you, exactly what I was after.

New MacBook M1 has Monterey OS & my old Mac has Big Sur. Any issues with migration assistant from Big Sur data onto Monterey?

I get to the point of just before the numbers should pop up but they don’t. I get an error message. Firewall is off I both computers.

have read a lot that it´s not very wise to migrate apps ... what happens when migrate apps, which will not work an AppleSilicon Macs??

I wonder if there's a way to do this with a cable.

I had to try three times when I tried with Migration Assist - Time Machine. Eventually, I had do the transfer manually, and I am still trying to sort things out. All my mailboxes have disappeared. Very frustrating.Thank you for this video.

It is said that it’s better to have a clean install what do you think?

Nice video, thanks - good to know about the extra steps that are going to be needed after the migration. I was wondering if I could use a cable to connect my new (yet to be bought) M2 Air, to my old MacBook Pro? Do you know if this would this work and would it be quicker? (Apple's 2 week return policy means I could buy the requisite cables with my new Air, use them for the install, then return them. This was actually suggested to me by an Apple Salesperson; unfortunately he couldn't tell me if Migration Assistant would work over cables rather than WiFi) Thanks....

Will there be any application confliction if you transfer everything from an Intel chip Mac to an Apple silicon Mac using Time capsule or Migration assistant?

this method can work for (( Migrating from Intel iMac 2017 to M3 mac ) ???

Thanks for the wonderful video! Now, can you also use a thunderbolt cable to transfer between computers as well, or do you have to do it over wi-fi only? Thanks again! I will be getting a new Mac Studio and transferring from a 2017 intel iMac which has a thunderbolt connection, and I was hoping that would work.

Do you have to have the same Mac OS on both machines?

Thanks for the info, but using migration assistent to copy from old to new M1 device, and then still have to uninstall the apps on the M1 to be sure you install the M1 supported software?

Will it be faster with time machine?

What if I had my old Mac stolen but I have a TM backup in an external drive, can I restore that in my new M1 Macbook?

Any issues with migrating from Intel to M1 though? I just tried three times and each time I finish migrating, I have issues with HDMI, SD card, and Bluetooth to name a few. Is it better with this Intel to M1 transition to start from scratch?

A manual transfer using time machine backup is faster and you don’t need an internet connection

The issue is all the preferences that was set up on the older mac are not transferred to the new mac. Its a pain!

Very helpful. Questions - can you transfer with a TB cable instead of wifi? How do you do that? Also, is there anywhere you know of where I could find an explanation about how to do a transfer manually, without migration assistant?

When migrating from an Intel iMac with a 1TB internal drive, and a Time Machine on an external drive, to an M1 iMac with a 256GB internal drive and a 1TB external drive, obviously the internal drive sizes don't match. Would the Migration Assistant know to transfer to the BIG M1 drive, or, should I attach the external drive with Time Machine to the new M1 iMac and manually move its content to the M1's external drive?

Mine had been stuck on 2 hours and 20 minutes for over an hour now… help?

or you can use time machine

Transfer would be quicker if you connected the laptops together with a thunderbolt cable.

Does all music tunes songs transfering?

does your email migrate to ?

Would it not be brilliant to let us know that one should run a malware scan on the old Mac, Use "Disk Utility" to clean up any problems etc before transfer? Great video though on how to use migration assistant to transfer one Mac to another albeit regardless of the new computer being an M1.

Isn’t it much simpler using a backup disc instead?

that awful background music made me want smash like the hulk so i had to stop watching what was otherwise a good video