Migrating to the Apple MacBook Air M2

January 11, 2023 (last year)

My 13” MacBook Pro, Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM (2017) was lasting ~2 hours at the coffeeshop, so decided to ugprade to the MacBook Air M2.

Friction Log

Migrating from Previous Mac

Migration Assistant actually did an excellent job of bringing over apps & settings: Move content to a new Mac.

What’s most impressive is that it has a Peer-to-Peer connection option that’s faster than Wi-Fi.

However, anytime you get a warning about Rosetta to open an app, that’s a sign you should reinstall it.
Git

When running git, I would get this error:

xcrun: error: invalid active developer path (/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools), missing xcrun at: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/xcrun. – StackOverflow

Solving this was easy as running:
```
xcode-select --install
```

Installing brew is the foundation of all other macOS software.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Clipboard Manager

Jumpcut has been with me for years as my favorite, minimal clipboard manager:
```
brew install --cask jumpcut
```
Plus, it’s a stack for my memory when writing posts like this 😅

curl -fsSL https://get.pnpm.io/install.sh | sh -

Node

By default, node didn’t exist on this machine.

Traditionally, I would manage Node with nvm, fnm, or volta.

But now that I exclusively use pnpm, pnpm can manage node versions for me instead!
```
pnpm env use --global lts
```
Then, you can tell pnpm to automatically install & respect this version when running pnpm commands in a project with use-node-version
```
node --version > .npmrc
```
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pure prompt

pnpm install --global pure-prompt

Then, update zsh to use it:

# .zshrc
autoload -U promptinit; promptinit
prompt pure

VS Code

Thanks to Settings Sync, all of my settings were already saved & synced between machines.

Conclusion

All-in-all, it took about an hour to get productive again (not including transferring files from Migration Assistant).

I used to think dotfiles were the solution to this!

But my dotfiles from 10 years ago were stale & irrelevant within a year. The ROI just didn’t exist.