Got a New Mac? How to Move Everything Over from an Old Mac (or a PC)

A new Mac is one of the few bits of technology that genuinely wants to help you move in. The tool that does it, Migration Assistant, is free, already on both machines, and in the good case you start it before bed and wake up to a Mac that looks exactly like your old one, down to the desktop picture and the browser tabs.

The trouble is that almost nothing written about it tells you the parts that actually go wrong. The step-by-step guides all describe the same happy path, and the first page of search results for anything that does go wrong is mostly companies selling cleaning or recovery software. So this is the version we give customers: the same process, plus the handful of moments where a few seconds of attention saves a long afternoon later.

Some of what follows is us pointing at things Apple has published and nobody quotes. Apple's own instructions for this job are spread across at least six different pages, and they do not all say the same thing. One page tells you to plug a laptop in and the other does not. One tells you where to find the app and the other gives a completely different route. And a screen that appears at the end of every migration, listing everything that could not be moved, is described on exactly one of them — we checked the two support articles Apple actually sends consumers to, and neither contains the words "migration summary" or "incompatible" anywhere.

We will go in the order you will meet things: the two decisions to make first, the transfer itself, the report at the end, what does not come across, and then — because plenty of people are moving from a Windows PC rather than another Mac — the switcher's version, which has a genuine trap in it that Apple's own pages do not agree about.

Two decisions to make before you plug anything in

The first one is whether to migrate at all. There is a school of thought that says a new computer deserves a clean start, and for a machine that has been misbehaving there is something in it. Our honest view for most people is the opposite: migrate. A Mac accumulates a decade of small decisions — printer setups, mail rules, keyboard shortcuts, saved Wi-Fi networks, the licence files for software you paid for once in 2019 — and rebuilding that by hand costs far more hours than anyone expects. If the old Mac was genuinely unstable, migrate your documents and settings and reinstall the apps fresh, which the checkbox screen lets you do.

The second decision is the one with a deadline attached, and it is the one worth knowing about in advance: when to do it. Apple is explicit that the tool exists in two places. In its words, "Migration Assistant is included with your Mac—both as an app and as part of the setup assistant that opens when you first start up a new Mac."

That means you can either transfer during the very first setup, when the new Mac asks whether you want to bring information across, or at any time afterwards. Both work. But they produce different results, and this is where people get into a mess.

If you migrate during first setup, your account arrives as the account, and the Mac finishes setup as a copy of the old one. If you finish setup first, create a user account for yourself, and only then run Migration Assistant, you are transferring a user account onto a Mac that already has one with your name on it. Apple handles that with a fork in the road, described below — replace the one that is there, or keep both — and keeping both is how people end up with two home folders, half their files in each, and twice the disk usage. Neither outcome is a disaster and neither is unfixable. It is simply much easier to migrate first and set up once.

So: if the new Mac is still in the box, resist the urge to power it on and play with it. Get the old machine ready first, then start the new one and let the setup assistant do the transfer.

Getting both Macs ready: Apple's checklist is split across two pages

Four things, and it is worth doing all four, because three of them are the usual causes of a transfer that stalls.

Update macOS on both machines. Apple's instruction is to "Make sure that macOS is up to date on each Mac" — and it adds a reassurance that saves a lot of worry: "It's not necessary for each Mac to be using the same version of macOS." An old Mac stuck on a version it can no longer move past is not a blocker. Install what each one will take, and carry on.

Turn off security software on both. In Apple's words: "If antivirus, firewall, or VPN software is in use on either Mac, turn off that software until you're done." This is the single most common reason a migration stalls with the two Macs unable to find each other at all. A VPN in particular will hide the two Macs from each other completely, and nothing on screen will tell you that is what happened.

Put them next to each other with Wi-Fi on. Apple: "To transfer wirelessly, make sure that both computers have Wi-Fi turned on and are near each other." Recent Macs make a direct link and do not need to be on the same network at all. The exception Apple names is old hardware: "If either Mac is using OS X El Capitan or earlier, or you're not sure, also connect them to the same Wi-Fi network."

Plug the laptops in. This one is interesting, because it appears in Apple's Mac User Guide — "If you're using a laptop computer, connect it to power" — and not in the support article most people land on. A MacBook that goes to sleep on battery in the middle of a two-hour transfer is a self-inflicted problem, and it is the one prerequisite the popular page leaves out.

One more thing that is not on any of Apple's lists but belongs on yours: make sure the old Mac has a current backup before you start. Migration Assistant is a copy, not a move — Apple states plainly that it "doesn't delete information from your old Mac" — so the risk here is genuinely low. But the moment you are most likely to wipe the old machine is the week after a successful migration, and that is exactly when you want a backup that predates all of it.

Where to actually open Migration Assistant (there are three doors)

If the new Mac is showing the setup assistant — the screens asking for your country and network — you do not need to find anything. Migration is part of that flow; take the option to transfer your information when it is offered.

If you have already finished setup, Apple's support article sends you to the Applications folder: "open Migration Assistant. You can find it in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder." You can also just press Command-Space and type the name.

Apple's Mac User Guide gives a third route that is easier to remember and that almost nobody mentions: go to System Settings, click General in the sidebar, click Transfer or Reset, then click Open Migration Assistant. Same app, and on a Mac you are still learning your way around, that path is a lot easier to find than the Utilities folder.

On the old Mac you open the same app and choose the option to transfer to another Mac. On the new one you choose the option to transfer from a Mac, Time Machine backup or startup disk. The two machines then find each other and show a code; Apple's instruction is to check "that it's the same code shown on your new Mac" before continuing. Take the two seconds to actually compare them.

The password screen is where this goes wrong most often

Partway through, Migration Assistant asks you to set a password for the account it is bringing over, and Apple's own page uses an unusually insistent tone about it — twice, in two different ways, depending on the kind of account.

For an administrator account: "If transferring an administrator account, you're asked to click Set Password and enter a secure password. Remember this password. You will need it to log in to the account on your new Mac."

For a standard account: "If transferring a standard account, a temporary password is assigned and appears onscreen. Write down this password. When the user first logs in, they must enter this password, then enter their own new password when prompted."

Read those again, because the second one is the one that bites. The temporary password is generated, shown once on screen, and is the only way into that account afterwards. If it is a family Mac and you are migrating a teenager's or a grandparent's account alongside your own, that password appears while you are standing at the machine and they are not. Photograph the screen. Actually photograph it.

And a note on the first one. People habitually set a new, tidier password here, on the reasonable theory that a new Mac is a good moment for a fresh start — and then type their muscle-memory old password at the login window the next morning and conclude the migration broke. It did not. If you are going to change the password, change it later from System Settings, once you are logged in and everything is working. Changing it at this screen buys you nothing and breaks the one habit you can rely on.

If it does go wrong, a Mac you cannot log in to is recoverable without erasing anything, and we have a separate guide to that. But the two-minute version is: do not invent a password at this screen.

If an account with the same name already exists: replace or rename

This is the fork you hit when you set the new Mac up first and migrate afterwards. Apple describes the two options precisely, and they are not equivalent.

Replace: "Replace the account on your new Mac with the account from your old Mac. You might also have the option to keep a copy of the replaced account's data by moving it to the Deleted Users folder, where you can access that data later."

Rename: "Or rename the old account before transferring it to your new Mac. This keeps both accounts, so that you can log in to them separately on your new Mac."

For almost everybody setting up a personal Mac, replace is the right answer, and the clause about the Deleted Users folder is your safety net — anything you had already put on the new Mac before starting is preserved rather than binned, and you can go and get it. The account you have used for ten years is the one you want to be living in.

Rename is the right answer in a narrower case: when the new Mac genuinely has to carry two separate people, or when you are deliberately keeping a clean account and want the old one alongside to pick through. Just go in knowing what it costs. Two accounts means two home folders, two copies of anything you had in both, and a Mac where half your documents are in an account you are not currently logged in to — which is, in our experience, the most common reason someone calls us convinced a migration "only moved some of it".

What the checkboxes mean, and Apple's quiet warning about apps

Before it starts copying, Migration Assistant sizes everything up. Apple: "Migration Assistant calculates how much storage space is used by all of your information, including applications, user accounts, files, folders, and settings. Wait for the calculation to complete." On a full machine that calculation alone can take several minutes and looks like a hang. It is not one.

Then you get a short list of categories, and the Mac User Guide is the page that actually explains them: Applications, User accounts, Other Files & Folders, Privacy & Security Settings, and System & Network. You can expand any of them and pick individual items — the guide notes you can choose "the user's documents, pictures, movies, desktop, downloads folder, and more".

The sentence worth stopping on is the one attached to Applications, because it is Apple's only acknowledgement anywhere that this part is not guaranteed: "Transfer apps to your new Mac. Incompatible apps or apps with newer versions already installed may not be transferred or may not be usable."

That is a mild way of saying something quite important. Software that was fine on the old Mac may be too old for the new one, especially if you have jumped several macOS versions in one go, and especially if the old Mac was an Intel machine and the new one is Apple silicon. Nothing about that is a reason to skip the migration — you would hit it on a clean install too, just later and with less information. But it is a reason to read the report at the end.

A practical tip on the checkboxes: if you are short of space on the new Mac, this screen is the place to deal with it. Untick a bulky media folder, let everything else across, and move the big stuff separately afterwards with an external drive. That is much less painful than a transfer that runs out of room in hour three.

Nobody mentions the report at the end, and it is the most useful screen in the process

Here is the find that prompted us to write this up. When a migration finishes, macOS shows you a summary of what went wrong. Apple's Mac User Guide describes it in one line: "When the transfer is complete, your computer restarts. A migration summary is shown if issues were found—for example, if documents couldn't be transferred or incompatible software was detected."

That is a list, produced by your own Mac, of the exact files it could not move and the exact software it believes will not run. It is the difference between discovering in March that a folder never arrived and knowing in the first five minutes.

And it is essentially undocumented where anyone would look. We searched both of the consumer support articles Apple links from the migration flow — the Mac-to-Mac one, published February 10, 2026, and the PC-to-Mac one, published September 14, 2026 — for the phrase "migration summary" and for the word "incompatible". Neither page contains either. The only Apple page that tells you the report exists is the Mac User Guide, which is not the page the setup process or a search result sends you to.

So the instruction is simple and it takes ten seconds: when the transfer finishes and the Mac restarts, read the screen before you click Done. If there is a summary, photograph it or write down what it says. Then go and check the specific things it named. In practice the entries fall into three groups — software that needs a newer version from its maker, files that were locked or in use, and items that were never really on the disk in the first place, which is the next section.

If you have already clicked Done and cannot remember what it said, you have not lost anything permanently; you simply have to check by hand instead. Open the apps you care about most and see whether they run, and compare the folders you rely on against the old Mac while you still have it.

How long it takes, the pause that is not a crash, and the number to check first

Apple's expectation-setting is one sentence and it is worth quoting to anyone standing over the machine worrying: "Large transfers might need hours to complete, and might seem to pause occasionally."

Both halves are true. A few hundred gigabytes over Wi-Fi is an overnight job, and the progress bar genuinely does stall for long stretches — typically on a folder with an enormous number of small files, like a mail store or a photo library. An estimate that has said three minutes remaining for the past hour is annoying, not broken. Our rule of thumb is that you only intervene if the machine is doing nothing at all for well over an hour and the old Mac's screen has also stopped changing.

If you would rather not find out, connect them with a cable. Ethernet between the two Macs — with adapters if needed — turns an overnight transfer into a couple of hours and takes the flaky-Wi-Fi failure mode off the table entirely. For a large migration it is the single best thing you can do.

One number to look at before you start, and it is a number Apple never gives you. We checked both migration support articles for any stated free-space requirement on the destination Mac: neither says anything about it. But the tool itself tells you how much is coming, in that calculation step. Take that figure, compare it with the free space on the new Mac — Apple menu, then System Settings, General, Storage — and make sure there is comfortable room, not a sliver. A 256GB MacBook Air receiving 230GB from an old machine is the setup for a long and unhappy evening.

Apple's migration pages never say the word iCloud — and that is where some of your files are

This one explains more "missing files" calls than anything else on the list, and it is a genuine blind spot in the documentation. We searched both of Apple's migration support articles for the word "iCloud". It does not appear on either of them.

Here is why that matters. If your Mac has iCloud Drive turned on with Optimize Mac Storage, macOS is allowed to remove the local copy of files you have not touched recently and leave a placeholder. The file is still yours and still listed in the Finder, but the data lives on Apple's servers, not on the disk being copied. Apple's own description of the status is unambiguous: "In iCloud: indicates that the folder or file is only in iCloud. You must be connected to the internet to work with the item, unless you download it to your Mac."

In the ordinary case this resolves itself — you sign in to iCloud on the new Mac and everything reappears. Where it hurts is when the old Mac has been sold, erased or returned as a trade-in, the iCloud account has been signed out somewhere along the way, or the files were in an account that is no longer paid up. Then the placeholders point at nothing you can reach.

There is a five-minute check that removes the whole risk, and Apple documents the mechanics of it on a separate page. In the Finder, click iCloud Drive in the sidebar, choose View then "as List", then choose View, Show View Options, and tick iCloud Status. You now get a column telling you the state of every item. "Downloaded" means it is genuinely on the disk — in Apple's words, "up to date between your Mac and iCloud and you can view or edit it immediately, with or without an internet connection". "In iCloud" means it is not. To pull one down, Apple's instruction is to Control-click the file and choose Download Now.

You will also occasionally see "Ineligible", which Apple explains is "usually because the size exceeds the 50 GB limit for an individual folder or file in iCloud Drive". That matters for the opposite reason: a file with that status was never backed up to iCloud at all, so it exists in exactly one place, and it had better be in the migration.

The practical version: before you erase or hand over the old Mac, make sure the folders you would miss show as Downloaded, or make sure you are confident the iCloud account they live in is one you can still get into. Do that while you still have both machines.

Apps come over. Sign-ins, licences and mail accounts do not.

Migration Assistant is very good at bringing applications across. It is not, and cannot be, a licence transfer service. Expect to sign back in to the big subscriptions — the Adobe apps, Microsoft 365, your password manager, your accounting package — on first launch. That is normal and it is not a sign anything failed.

The one to plan for is anything with a device-count limit, where the old Mac still counts as one of your activations. If you are going to wipe or sell it, deactivate or sign out on the old machine before it goes, rather than trying to persuade a support desk to free the slot afterwards.

Email has its own footnote, and Apple puts it in the fine print of the Mac-to-Mac page: "Migration Assistant transfers your email, but to access it you might first need to set up your email account again in your email app." In other words, your messages arrive, and Mail may still ask you to re-authenticate the account they belong to. Have the email password to hand on migration day. If it is a Gmail, Outlook or iCloud address with two-factor turned on, have your phone to hand too — discovering you cannot get into your own email is a rotten way to start with a new machine.

One more, for anyone moving from an Intel Mac to an Apple silicon one: some older software was only ever built for Intel processors, and whether it still runs depends on a translation layer with a limited life left in it. That is a buying question more than a migration question, and we have written about it separately in our piece on Macs and macOS updates. It is worth reading before you decide which apps to reinstall rather than re-buy.

If the old Mac is broken or already gone: migrate from the Time Machine backup

Migration Assistant does not need two working Macs. It will take everything from a Time Machine backup instead, and Apple's description of what that gets you is generous: "If you made a Time Machine backup of your Mac, Migration Assistant can use that backup to restore all of your personal files, including your apps and everything in your user account."

The process is the same as the Mac-to-Mac one, with the backup drive standing in for the old machine: connect the drive, open Migration Assistant on the new Mac, choose the option to transfer from a Mac, Time Machine or startup disk, then select the disk and the backup. Apple notes it "might take a few moments to appear" — and that if you want an older snapshot rather than the most recent one, you click the disclosure arrow next to the backup shown and choose from the list. That is a useful detail if the most recent backup ran after whatever went wrong.

There is one ordering rule on that page that is easy to trip over if you are restoring rather than upgrading: "If you need to reinstall macOS, do that before continuing. For example, if your Mac starts up to a flashing question mark, you need to first reinstall macOS." A Mac that cannot start has to be given a working system first; the migration comes after.

This route is also the answer to a question we get a lot: what if the old Mac is dead? If it will not turn on, the data is very often still perfectly intact on its drive, and there are ways to get at it. That is a different job from a migration, and worth a conversation before anyone decides the files are gone.

Coming from a Windows PC? Get the right version of the tool — Apple's own pages disagree about one stretch

Switching from Windows works, and it works better than most people expect. Apple's summary: "Migration Assistant copies contacts, calendars, email accounts, and more from your Windows PC to the appropriate places on your Mac. It doesn't delete information from your PC or replace the operating system (macOS) on your Mac."

The difference from a Mac-to-Mac move is that the PC needs a piece of software installed — Windows Migration Assistant — and there is not one of it. There are six, and the one you need depends on which macOS your new Mac is running. Get this wrong and the two machines simply will not see each other, with no useful message explaining why.

Apple's current page, published September 14, 2026, lays the versions out like this. Version 3.2.0.0 is for migrating from Windows 10 or later to macOS 27 Golden Gate, macOS Tahoe 26, macOS Sequoia 15 or macOS Sonoma 14. Version 2.4.5.0 is for migrating from Windows 7 or later to macOS Ventura 13 or macOS Monterey 12. Version 2.3.1.0 covers macOS Big Sur 11. And versions 2.2.0.1, 2.1.2.0 and 1.0.5.7, in Apple's phrasing, "remain available for migrating to earlier versions of macOS".

Now the discrepancy, which is worth knowing because it lands on a real range of machines. The download page for version 3.2.0.0, published August 17, 2026, states its system requirements as "macOS Sonoma 14.4 or later" and "Windows 10 or later". But the instructions page says 3.2.0.0 is for "macOS Sonoma 14" with no qualifier. Those two Apple pages do not cover the same set of Macs: a Mac running Sonoma 14.0, 14.1, 14.2 or 14.3 is told by one page to use a version the other page says it does not meet the requirements for.

The only Apple page that resolves it is one Apple has stopped maintaining. The download page for version 2.4.5.0 lists its requirements as "macOS Monterey, macOS Ventura, or macOS Sonoma (14.3 or earlier)" — which is exactly the missing stretch — and that page carries a banner reading "This article has been archived and is no longer updated by Apple". Its published date is March 11, 2024. The maintained instructions page has since dropped the Sonoma clause from its description of that version.

We would not send anyone to an archived download page on the strength of that, and we are not going to. The clean answer is the one Apple's own first instruction gives you anyway: update the Mac. Sonoma 14.4 came out a long time ago and the update is free. Take the new Mac to the latest version it will run, then download version 3.2.0.0, and the ambiguity disappears. If for some reason the Mac genuinely cannot be updated past 14.3, that is the moment to ask someone rather than guess — and it is a good moment to look at whether that Mac is still getting security updates at all.

Two more prerequisites specific to the PC side. Windows should be fully up to date, and Apple asks you to "Quit all apps and turn off any settings that could cause your PC to perform other tasks", plus disable antivirus, firewall and VPN software on both machines — the same rule as before, and the same failure if you skip it.

Where your PC files actually land on the Mac

This is the part that generates the "it did not transfer my files" calls, and in nearly every case it did transfer them — to somewhere the person was not looking. Apple publishes the map, on a Mac User Guide page almost nobody finds.

Your Documents, Videos, Music and Pictures folders land where you would expect: "In the Documents, Movies, Music, and Pictures folders in your home folder in the Finder." Files from the Windows desktop are "Moved to the desktop of your Mac".

Then the one to write down. Anything that was not inside your Windows user folder — the stuff on the D: drive, the second internal disk, the root of C: — goes somewhere else entirely. Apple's table lists "Files outside of the User folder" against a single location: "In the Finder, in the /Users/Shared folder." To get there, open the Finder, choose Go then Go to Folder, and type /Users/Shared. Your data is very probably sitting right there. Apple adds a condition that explains the cases where it is not: transferring those disks "requires using Migration Assistant while logged in to your PC as an administrator".

Photos are the second surprise. They do not go into the Photos app. Apple's table says photos land in your Home folder, "which you can then manually add to the Photos app on your Mac, or let Photos search your Mac for photos to import". So a new Mac with an empty-looking Photos library is the expected outcome, not a failed transfer — you import them yourself afterwards.

Browser bookmarks are the third. Whichever browser you used, they end up in one place: Apple's table lists "Homepage and bookmarks from Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari" as all going to Safari. If you install Chrome on the Mac and find it empty, nothing was lost — sign in to your Google account in Chrome, or import from Safari.

Mail, contacts and calendars do go to the right apps — Outlook and Windows Mail into Mail, People and Outlook contacts into Contacts, appointments into Calendar. Outlook tasks become Reminders, but only "if transferring to a Mac using macOS 13 or later". Your desktop picture, language and location settings come across too, and on macOS 13 or later so do your known Wi-Fi networks.

Two limits worth knowing in advance. First, Windows programs do not transfer — Apple's table of what moves and where lists no row for installed applications at all, and it could not, because Windows software does not run on macOS. Budget for buying or subscribing to Mac equivalents, and check that before you commit to the switch, not after. Second, the tool works one Windows user at a time. Apple's guide: "If you want to transfer multiple users, you need to log in as each of those users and rerun Windows Migration Assistant."

One last step people skip, and Apple flags it: authorise the new Mac for purchases with your Apple Account, and do it "before you sync or play content downloaded from Apple".

The Bluetooth requirement that stops PC migrations before they start

A PC-to-Mac transfer needs more than Wi-Fi. Apple's instruction: "Make sure that your Mac and PC are near each other and have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on." And then the sentence that explains a whole category of failures on older hardware: "If your older PC doesn't support Bluetooth Low Energy, you might get a message that a Bluetooth adapter is required. Bluetooth adapters that connect to your PC's USB port are widely available."

That is a real and specific obstacle. An older desktop tower, in particular, may have no Bluetooth at all, and the fix is a USB dongle costing very little — but you need to know that before migration evening, not during it.

There is an age-related wrinkle on the Mac side too. Apple: "If your Mac is using macOS 13 or earlier, or you're not sure, connect both computers to the same network, or connect them directly to each other using an Ethernet cable." Newer Macs handle the connection themselves. Older ones want to be on the same network as the PC — or, better, wired straight to it, which is faster anyway.

If a PC migration fails

Apple publishes a troubleshooting section for the Windows route, which is more than it does for the Mac-to-Mac one — we checked, and the Mac-to-Mac support article has no failure section at all.

The first thing it asks you to confirm is the version question from earlier: check "that you are using the correct version of Windows Migration Assistant on your PC". If you skipped that, go back and do it.

The second is a disk check on the PC, and this one is worth running on any elderly Windows machine before you trust it with anything. Apple's steps: right-click the Start button and click Run, type cmd and press Enter, then at the prompt type chkdsk and press Enter. If it reports problems, run it again as chkdsk drive: /F, where drive is the letter of your Windows startup disk — usually C — press Enter, type Y, and restart the PC. Apple's follow-up is the important part: "Repeat this process until the check disk utility reports no issues. If the utility can't fix every issue that it found, you might need to have your PC serviced."

That last sentence is a polite way of saying the drive may be failing, and if you see it, stop trying to migrate and start copying your irreplaceable files off immediately, in order of how much you would miss them.

And the fallback, in Apple's own words: "If you can't resolve the issue, use an external storage device or file sharing to copy important files from your PC to your Mac." It is less elegant and it always works. Documents, photos and downloads dragged onto an external drive and then onto the Mac will get you ninety per cent of what you actually care about, and you can rebuild the rest by hand.

Do not erase the old computer yet

Give it two weeks. Not because migrations commonly fail, but because the things you discover missing are always the things you use monthly rather than daily — a tax folder, a scanned document, the licence email for something, a plug-in for a program you only open at quarter end. While the old machine still boots, all of those are ten minutes of work. After it has been erased, some of them are gone.

When you are ready, Apple's page on preparing a Mac to sell or trade in is refreshingly short for anything modern enough. If you are running macOS Monterey 12 or later on a Mac with Apple silicon or a Mac with an Apple T2 Security Chip, there is a single feature that does it all: "The Erase All Content and Settings feature makes it easier to reset your Mac to factory settings. If you can use Erase All Content and Settings, you don't have to complete any of the other steps in this article."

On anything older there is a checklist instead — sign out of iCloud, sign out of iMessage, then erase and reinstall macOS from Recovery — and one small detail on that page that saves time: when you sign out of iCloud, "you're asked whether to keep a copy of your iCloud data on this Mac. It's faster to keep a copy, because you will erase your Mac later." You are about to wipe the disk, so there is no point waiting for it to delete things first.

Whichever route applies, sign out before you erase, and never hand over, sell or post a Mac that is still signed in to your Apple Account. A signed-in Mac is a locked Mac to its next owner, and an account you cannot get into afterwards is a much bigger problem than a slow transfer.

How we can help

We set up new computers for households and small businesses across Southern California and the Coachella Valley, onsite or remotely. A migration day is one of the more satisfying jobs we do, because almost all of the value is in the parts nobody writes down: making sure the backup is real before anything is touched, getting the machines wired rather than wireless, reading the summary at the end, and then the boring half hour afterwards where mail, printers, scanners, licences and the accounting package are all checked while the old computer is still sitting there.

If you would rather not do it yourself, or you have already done it and something has not turned up, get in touch. Bring both machines if you can — having the old one available turns most "it did not transfer" problems into a five-minute fix. Because we do not sell computers or software, nothing here is steering you toward a purchase; if the honest answer is that the old Mac has another three good years in it, that is what we will tell you.