There's no doubt about it: some things about using a Mac aren't as easy as they used to be. Remember when creating a bootable system backup was as simple as dragging your System Folder to another hard drive? Nothing against Mac OS X, of course, which is the greatest thing since some brilliant individual said "Hey, this bread would be even cooler if someone took a knife to it"; that said, though, we do miss Mac OS 9's flexibility when it comes to dragging system files all over creation. For example, gone are those halcyon days when trading up to a new Mac meant little more than starting up File Sharing, mounting your new hard disk on your old Desktop, and dragging your entire old hard drive into a folder on the new Mac, where its contents could subsequently be moved wherever you needed them. Try that now and you can end up with a big ol' mess.

But that doesn't mean there aren't other improvements that compensate. We know we've already mentioned the nifty new addition to Apple's Setup Assistant that walks you through transferring data from your old Mac to your new one, but we're going to mention it again for the simple reason that we recently had the opportunity to use it-- and it's so slick it makes Teflon look like tree bark in comparison. It really does hold your hand through every step of the process, telling you when to plug in the FireWire cable between your two Macs, when to boot the old Mac with the "T" key held down to put it into FireWire Target Disk mode, etc. We clicked a few checkboxes to choose what to transfer, let it do its thing, and blammo-- 24 minutes later, a formerly off-the-shelf eMac was booting with 6 GB of transferred data, including applications, multiple user accounts, network settings, software preferences, etc. Logging in was just like sitting down at the old iMac... just with a bigger screen, a faster processor, more disk space, better graphics, etc.

It isn't perfect, mind you. For one thing, even after copying across network settings perfectly, Setup Assistant wants to walk you through setting up your Internet connection from scratch, as if it had never happened. (Opt to set up your network "later" and as soon as the Setup Assistant quits, you'll find that your old network settings are set up as expected.) It also didn't move everything across; some hardware-specific preferences like Energy Saver settings weren't copied, which only makes sense (new hardware, new hardware settings), but UNIX tools that had been installed into the old iMac's BSD layer were ignored and needed to be reinstalled, and the Developer Tools were likewise left behind. But the assistant never claims it'll move any of this stuff in the first place, so it's not a bug so much as a potential new feature for version 2.0. And we suppose it would have been nice if the assistant could have somehow offered to set iTunes on the new eMac to queue up an iTMS deauthorization request for the old iMac, but now we're really reaching.

That's the thing, though; the assistant made the transition from an old Mac to a new one so close to seamless that we really have to dig deep to find any criticism. It used to take us weeks of reinstalling apps, recreating user accounts, tweaking preferences, etc. to make a new Mac feel as comfortable as the old one; the new Setup Assistant did it in half an hour. So if you've been thinking about trading up to a new system, Apple's no-hassle upgrade process may be one more reason to take the plunge-- provided your old Mac has a FireWire port and is running Mac OS X 10.1 or later, that is. If not, well, you're on your own...