Hi guys, hope y'all are doing great.

I finally got some money to upgrade from my dying 2009 macbook pro to a new one. Is any of you familiar with migration from on mac to another ? Will i have access to all the softwares installed on the old one or will install them again ? How are licenses handled ?

I don't want to lose what took so many time and energy to build so your informed thoughts will be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

It depends on the software and the way it's registered, but the bad news is, no matter how you do it, either by migrating to a new computer via the OS install program or by cloning your old drive to a new one, or even if you just yanked your old hard drive out of the 2009 MacBook Pro and put it in a new one, you will likely have to re-enter at least some of your software licenses and serial numbers. Some of your software registrations are linked to your specific motherboard, others to one specific hard drive (the one you originally installed to), and those, you will most likely have to enter again. The good news is, you almost definitely won't have to re-install any actual software, you'll just end up re-installing a bunch of licenses and registration numbers. And not all of them. Some of them will be copied over when you migrate, and some of them are inside the software itself, so they'll remain unlocked when you copy everything over. It's aggravating, but the last time I upgraded my MacBook hard drive, I foolishly decided to install everything over clean onto the new drive and that took forever. Migrating is probably your best bet, since that will put a clean OS on your new machine, then copy everything else over from your old drive. Depending on how fast you are and how much spare time you have, it might not take any longer than a day to re-register everything.

 

4 Weeks ago I bought a new 4K iMac with 16 GB ram and a 512 GB Flash Drive.
It needs 2 Days to install all my sounds and Plug-Ins (Logic, Native Instruments......and lots more.
But now Im ready....this machine is a Monster

 

pretty much what Iggy said.

I would HIGHLY suggest doing a migrate, over a clone - if you must... although, i would recommend a fresh install of everything onto the new machine, from scratch. Yes, it definitely takes longer, but you'll be sure to not migrate/transfer or clone over any old issues, problems and/or "mess" you have may have had on the old hd, to the new one.

With that being said, i have multiple partitions built from scratch, with different OS X versions and different amounts of stuff installed, ready to be cloned onto any machine, at any time. i'm quite used to authorizing and re-registering, so for me it is quite a simple task, just time consuming. I've been through many, many mac machines over the years.

Good luck, go slow and do it right! Cheers

 

I'm waiting for 2016 MBP