I'm migrating from a MacBook (plastic, early 2008) to a MacBook (aluminum). Aside from differences in motherboard, chipset, video, display and chassis they're basically the same hardware platform, but even still I'm not concerned since moving Mac installations from one machine to another has historically and comparatively been very easy. Typically I do these transfers using Firewire but true to form Apple doesn't let standards get in the way of progress and the new MacBooks don't have Firewire (they also require yet another VGA/DVI display adapter).

I fired up the new MacBook and during the setup assistant it asks if I want to transfer info from another Mac. I say sure. It tells me to plug the two Macs together with an ethernet cable. Easy enough. It then tells me to launch Migration Assistant on the source Mac, which I do. The target Mac gives me an alphanumeric code to type in on the source Mac. OK. Then I'm given the option of selecting what to transfer. I select all. The total amount is about 150GB. It initially estimates 4+ hours to complete but after a few minutes settles to a time of about 2.5 hours.

So I leave for a while...

When I return the new MacBook says it's done. I proceed through the registration screen (oddly enough, I can't CMD-Q) and everything seems to have survived the transfer except for:

• a very large (20+ GB) VM file (without Firewire I copied it lillypad style using a USB disk).

• The serial number for Remote Desktop (not sure why but this always needs replacing after imaging).

• Photoshop CS3 gives an error on first launch, but not on subsequent.

Overall I'm very impressed with how easy it was to move from one laptop to the other (without Firewire) and keeping all my settings, applications, and configs intact.

Other general impressions of the new MacBook

• Instead of a trackpad + button this laptop just has one large trackpad that is also a physical button. So far, my left-clicking thumb hasn't even noticed a difference.

• The backlit keyboard: Nice.

• The LED display: Nice and bright.

• The weight is lighter, albeit slightly, but definitely appreciated.

• The rounded edges, aluminum case, and overall feel of the thing is a welcome improvement.

• The easily accessible HDD is a huge plus, although I'm not sure how I feel about the flimsy panel that comes off to expose the HDD and battery.

Overall the migration went very smooth, took a relatively small amount of time, and generates and over-all thumbs-up from me.

UPDATE: Transferring 40GB worth of movies without Target mode wasn't fun. I ended up enabling Internet Sharing on one Mac and plugging the other into it with Ethernet. After getting it configured correctly the transfer speeds over both auto-sensing gigabit ports was plenty fast. My issue is one of a honor. Apple should give us a satisfactory replacement when they abandon a standard. It's OK to get rid of Firewire, but why not also give us something that let's us achieve the same or better features?