There’s a reason the Apple logo has a bite taken out of it. It’s a reference to the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Once you take a bite out of that apple, you are transformed –and more importantly you can’t go back to how you were before.
I just restored a Macintosh from a Time Machine backup and my transformation is complete. I am now a fanboy. For those of you that don’t know what that is, it’s a fan who lets his passion override his social graces.
It was so easy! I was upgrading a Mac – which meant I wanted to take everything on my old Mac and move it to my new Mac. One of the easiest ways to do this is take the Time Machine backup (which happens hourly if you have it set up), and copy everything over to the new Mac.
However, I’ve worked with computers now for over 30 years and things rarely turn out the way they are supposed to. There’s usually some small thing that turns into a large headache, and something you think will be hard that turns out to be easy.
This was so smooth. I set the restore in motion and walked away from the machine for a couple of hours. When I came back it rebooted and every single thing was there. And every single thing worked. It was unbelievable. I will put flowers on Steve Jobs’ tombstone.
Ok, I’m exaggerating slightly. Some of the cloud drives, like OneDrive, had to be set up again. I had to sign into Adobe Creative Cloud to get my licenses in order – which was an easy experience with all my account info all in one place. (Thanks Adobe!) Microsoft was the biggest pain in the ass. My MS Office license had slipped away. I keep very good records of license numbers, but somehow I couldn’t locate the string of upgrades I bought that got me to Office Mac 2011. I spent 20 minutes chatting with Microsoft trying to get the license numbers squared away and finally ended up springing $10 for a home use program just to make the problem go away. It’s really pitiful that Microsoft can’t link licenses back to a single user the way Adobe can. But, I will say their tech support was patient and helpful.
Notice how these were not Apple issues. Everything Apple-related came back in a few clicks. I don’t dislike Windows. I use Quicken on Windows several times a week. Excel on Windows feels much crisper and there are great Windows utilities like Notepad++ that don’t have any Mac equivalent. But the user experience of this upgrade was remarkable.
by 