MacOS Upgrades
MacOS Upgrades
Bye Bye Itunes . . .
Wednesday, July 6, 2022
I’ve been holding off on updating my Macs from Mojave 10.14.7 to Catalina 10.15 and beyond primarily because of iTunes being abandoned in favor of new Music and TV apps. I had heard various reports that the transition went without a hitch, to complete disaster. So Monday I tried updating a spare i7 Mini.
First discovery is it doesn’t work on an existing HFS+ formatted drive. A couple of botched installs later, I erased the drive, repartitioned and formatted with APFS, and installed Catalina successfully. Unless you wipe the drive, the old files will be saved in a separate inaccessible partition on the drive called “HD - data”, taking up space, but useless. So updating in place doesn’t work. You need a clean, blank HD for installation.
That hurdle jumped, on to migrating my stuff from another Mac. Run Migration Assistant on both Macs and start poking around to see what’s come across. The migration didn’t take long enough for everything to have copied. Turns out a lot of stuff did transfer like Mailboxes and many but not all setups and preferences. Passwords were partially transferred. Generally everything Apple iCloud-related transferred, but while other mail accounts appeared, passwords didn’t, and account setups had to be repeated. Same for media, such as iTunes library, Logic library, and other data and documents. A glance at Music showed all the stuff purchased from the iTunes Music Store available for streaming, but not downloaded. The 2/3 of the library not from ITMS wasn’t there. Same for TV. So in essence, no media were transferred. There were new apps which displayed my Apple purchases, but that’s it. If you buy or stream movies from Apple and listen to Apple Music, everything is peachy. Nothing gets copied across, however. Everything has to be imported or downloaded again.
It took two days to import my music, movies, and TV shows from another Mac via gigabit ethernet. I expect to spend most of today copying Logic instruments and projects, other archived audio, video, and documents and cleaning up. So this is as painful as I feared it might be.
At least I know what is in store when I buy an M2 Mini, whenever that gets released. I assume of course that a second gen Apple silicon Mini will be a big advance over the M1 Mini. The ball is in Apple’s court for now.