The first time you start up a new Apple computer it asks if you want to transfer data from another computer. If you select yes, it opens Migration assistant, and gives you the option to connect to another computer. There are various ways you can connect. Some are very slow! Some are fast.

• The slowest is to use wifi. If you connect your computers using wifi it may take days (literally days) to transfer the data across.
• A faster way is to connect the 2 computers using an ethernet cable. This is still fairly slow.
• The fastest way is to use a thunderbolt USB-C cable to connect the 2 computers together.

I recently used Thunderbolt to connect my new MacBook Pro to my old Mac Mini and it reduced the transfer time from days to hours.

Ethernet can transfer at speeds up to 1Gbps.

Thunderbolt 3 can transfer at speeds up to 40Gbps. It’s 40 times faster!

This is what a Thunderbolt (USB-C) cable looks like:

You simply connect the thunderbolt port of one MacBook directly to the thunderbolt port of the second MacBook.

If it doesn’t work, check out this article on the different types of USB-C cables that Apple sells.