Issues when transferring data from old MacBook to new one

strawberry12358 wrote:

What cable do I need to transfer data? Apple Store unable to help when I went in.

If your old Mac is from 12 years ago, that predates Thunderbolt 3 and means a cable-based connection will require a Thunderbolt-3-to-2 adapter (probably not worth buying one for this).

Do you use Time Machine to back up your Mac? If so, make a fresh backup of the old Mac and use that as the source for Migration Assistant to set up the new Mac. IMO, that is the most efficient way (for example, when setting up my new M4 Pro MBP, it took about 25 minutes to transfer ~700 GB of data from my 2019 MBP, but I should note that was with a backup on an SSD, it would have taken a couple of hours with an HDD backup).

If you don't use Time Machine to back up your Mac, now is the time to start. Internal drives, whether HDDs or SSDs, come in two types: those that have failed and those that haven't failed yet. You should aim for a drive that is 2-3 times the size of your internal storage. A 1 TB SSD can be bought for ~$80, you could run a TM backup of your old Mac and use that to set up the new one, then use the drive as the TM backup of the new Mac going forward. My $0.02.

The process is to begin setting up your new computer. Then it will ask you if you wish to do a transfer. Connect the two computers and identify what things are to be transferred. It's all of them or none. The transfer should be done via a cable and should not take that long. You may wish to do a new download and installation of your apps since the old computer's older versions may not work. If this doesn't work then use a flash drive to transfer your files.

It may be finicky given the device age or content. You may have success syncing through iCloud or simply using an external drive to move files.