Much of the past week has been devoted to migrating what I want to keep from my vintage 2006 iBook to a new MacBook Air. Although that was too big a gap (OS X 10.4.11 Tiger to 10.10.2 Yosemite) for the Migration Assistant to bridge it hasn’t been an unpleasant task.
I have been quite happy with with the iBook G4 but with no updates being made available for PPC Macs, it was getting more and more difficult to use the Internet. Alas, even WordPress was complaining about my browser being out of date.
Even with a DSL connection, the new computer was able to play video and audio streaming with little or no rebuffering. On the iBook that was frequent plus when advertisements came on they would often crash Safari or Mozilla. It often took an hour and a half to watch a one hour show.
I ordered a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adaptor and was able to connect the iBook to the Air easily. I downloaded Numbers first but found that AppleWorks files are not compatible, so I got on to the iBook and exported my “housekeeping” spreadsheets to Excel format which opened in Numbers. Only lost the charts and some formatting. There was a learning curve but there are a lot of nice features in Numbers and it is actually easier to use in many ways.
One of the big disappointments was with my Samsung S390 mobile phone’s lack of compatibility. I had been unable to connect it with the iBook:
- With the iBook you had the choice of AirPort or Bluetooth cards, I got the AirPort
- the phone wouldn’t mount as a volume when connected to a USB port (presumably because the iBook was old)
I have been using a Bluetooth connection between the Samsung and my old Motorola flip phone to get pictures then connecting the Motorola to the iBook with a USB cable. It would mount as two volumes and I could drag and drop files (and can do the same on the new computer). The Samsung phone still won’t mount on the MacBook Air. I was able to transfer a few files via Bluetooth, but it was frustrating and I haven’t been able to replicate that! Since the Samsung phone is over two years old, suspect that the most viable solution will be to never buy another Samsung phone. Saw a lot of references to such problems when I searched, for both PCs and Macs.
Alas, my Apple LaserWriter 12/640 PS doesn’t work with the new computer. It dates from the 1980s and recently found that it won’t feed paper when it has been powered up more than an hour or two. So, I am printing files to PDF documents then copying them to a folder on the iBook for printing in batches. The other thing that makes this not a serious issue is that there is print shop just up the road that does beautiful work and has more hardware than I could ever fit in here.
While you can’t play audio CDs (or DVDs) over an ethernet connection, discovered that the new iTunes, by using the Open Library command under File, will bring in entire CDs as well as other audio files that were in the iTunes library folder on the old machine. Fortunately I only view one or two DVDs a month and listen to fewer audio CDs.
I probably should have upgraded sooner but the past few years have been hectic.
Being genius-geeks, the people at Apple should be able to make older but still working computers and tablets and phones and pods and pads up-gradable. I have an iPad that works great, except I keep getting told to upgrade the ios. But you can’t. If it’s a matter of security with the older systems, fix that. You’re genius-geek people.
That’s my ain’t-no-genius opinion.
Glad you are a genius, Kathy, and able to transfer from the old to the new.
I am afraid that phones and tablets are made to be disposables — toss them after a year or two. At least a lot of mobile phone manufacturers give you a bag to send them back for recycling.
The change in operating system was the equivalent of six generations in genealogy! There was a change in processor architecture too — that is what lead to not offering software updates.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just drop in a new module for hardware upgrades?
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