I am using an 2013 iMac 27 inch. It runs fine, but I really would like to upgrade to a new M4. I have a ton of data on a 1 TB drive. I think what Apple charges for larger SSD drives is ridiculous. So I don’t think I can use migration assistant. Is there a strategy to move to a new Mac from an old one but the new Mac has a smaller internal drive but will have a larger external drive. I think Apple should make it easier to upgrade to a new Mac but their prices for bigger SSD drives seem high.
I want to move to a new Mac because my old one is basically no longer supported getting slower.
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David Staller
I would recommend against this. I know it seems like Apple charges a lot for a drive upgrade, but you'll have a lot of issues if you are used to 1 TB and you go to half that. Migration would be the first problem. You'd need to get your current Mac down to well below 0.5 TB first, which means trashing things, archiving things to external drives, etc. Then you'll have to learn how to live with less than 0.5 TB -- far less as you need some of that space for swap memory. Operating a 512GB drive with 475GB taken = slow Mac because no room for swap.
You can be mad at Apple for charging $200 to go from 512GB to 1TB, but in the end you'll just be slowing down your Mac and creating lots of problems for yourself to deal with managing your files across multiple drives, dealing with less room for swap, iCloud Drive caching and more.
Is there a way to go thru my old iMac and delete old apps that will not be compatible to a new M4 ? Or will migration assistance do that, not move the apps. Thanks for your advice
David: There's no way for your old Mac to know which apps may not work on a new Mac. But you can certainly go through them manually, update things, remove apps you no longer use, etc. You can always look at developer sites if you have questions about an app.
I want to sync my current iMac Intel Core i5..drive 800.96 GB available of 1.03 TB.. with ... New MacBook Air M3 disk 512 GB.... The iMac is hard to drag along on vacations! want to keep them sync'd up via iCloud!
Thanks for your input!