Late today my bride and I purchased a new HP/Compaq tower to replace an aging Sony to run the accounting in her business. This evening we purchased a new G5 iMac 17″ to replace an aging 15″ iMac whose screen and power had become too limiting for one of her employees.  So I had a personal experience with migrating data from a machine running WinXP-to-WinXP and a Mac OS X-to-Mac OS X machine the same day.

I gotta tell ya, it’s night and day.

Apple has made it brain-dead-simple to copy *all* relevant files from an old Mac to a new one by simply hooking up a firewire cable between the Mac’s and starting up the old one in firewire disk mode (this is where the old Mac looks to the new Mac like a firewire hard drive). Click a button and wait for everything to copy over (in my case 4GB’s took about 24 minutes) and it’s done. I was stunned to discover that even the file placement on the desktop had all of them in exactly the same spot as they were on the old Mac!

What was my experience with the PC like? I ended up copying 950MB’s of files scattered all over the place (luckily I’d received a new 1GB USB thumb drive for Christmas or I woulda been burning CD’s) and copying them to the new machine. With about a half dozen round trips to the Sony and back to the HP/Compaq, I’d finally copied over all the relevant files. NOT a job for Joe Sixpack.

Oh yeah, it took me about 3 hours on the HP/Compaq vs. 45 minutes on the Mac (24 to copy and 21 to tweak a few things).

I understand there are tools you can buy to assist with migrating data from an old PC to a new one, but shouldn’t the manufacturer make this a painless process for the customer? Gee…if it’s really simple to migrate to a new machine, wouldn’t people be more apt to buy new machines? As my son would say, “Doh!”