As I blogged about before for, my Mac is 3 years old and still working great. The only exception is the battery. I’m on my second and it only lasts about 30 minutes. I bought an “advanced” battery from FastMac. Initially it had a nice long life, but after a year and (168 cycles) its almost worthless. I’m not sure I’d go with them again. :-(

Yesterday I stopped by my local Apple Store and purchased a new MacBook Pro to replace my old one (planning to give my wife my existing MacBook Pro).

I unpacked it last night as was a bit disappointed that over a month after OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was released, it only had OS X 10.5. *sigh* It took almost an hour to upgrade (then apply the patches).

But, here’s the real deal: I have never in my life been able to move/upgrade my system as easily as I did last night.

Instead of this being a week of setting the PCs by each other, copying various files over, entering settings and preferences, realizing I forgot something, downloading patches, etc it took me 3 hours. (well… actually it took me 30 minutes and the laptop 3 hours to copy stuff while I slept :-) ).

I had both Macs connected to my network and fired up the “Migration Assistant” on both Macs. Clicked through a few settings/options and off it went copying my applications, settings and documents.

I didn’t expect it to just work. I expected lots of issues, but I logged in to my new Mac and everything was there. My Dock settings, my applications, my mail, my documents, my desktop wallpaper, passwords, etc all there!!

I couldn’t be happier!!

I’m sure I’ll find some stuff that didn’t get copied, but so far the only thing that isn’t working is VMWare’s Fusion (which has a pretty involved installation program). Its there, but not working. My VM image is there however.

Hats off to the Apple developers for making this “just work”…