Migrating Data from MacBook Air to MacBook Pro Using Migration Assistant and Manual Steps

The author decided to replace a two‑year‑old MacBook Air with a MacBook Pro and needed to migrate a large amount of personal and development data.

Manual migration: Previously, switching from an Intel‑based Mac to an M‑chip Mac forced a manual, two‑day effort to reorganize fragmented files because many applications were incompatible.

One‑click migration: This time both machines use Apple Silicon, so the built‑in Migration Assistant was tried. After connecting both Macs to the same Wi‑Fi network and launching Migration Assistant on each, the author selected “to another Mac” on the old machine and “from a Mac, Time Machine backup, or startup disk” on the new one. The process transferred over 760 000 files (~500 GB) in about one hour, as shown in the screenshots:

After migration, only one application showed a minor issue, which the author resolved by switching to an alternative. The SSH agent needed the private key re‑added, which was done with the following commands:

ssh-add -l (shows no keys) and then ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa to load the key.

All browser accounts, cookies, WeChat chat history, Docker images, containers, and even running Kubernetes pods were successfully transferred, and the cursor‑movement speed setting was preserved.

The author also shares a useful macOS command to increase cursor speed:

# Run in Terminal and restart the computer; set to 2 to restore default
$ defaults write NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat -int 1

Finally, the author notes that this article was written on the new machine and provides contact information.