A Tool for Apple

After my powerbook hinge exploded a while back, I figured out how to get around it by just leaning the screen against things. While not ideal, it was cheaper than the $600 repair that Apple quoted me, until the video from the LCD stopped working yesterday.

At that point it was either repair, buy a PC laptop, or replace with a new mac laptop. I weighed the options, and thanks to new pricing I ended up going for a 12" powerbook. It was only a few hundred bucks more than the PC laptop I was eyeing and I figured it'd be easier to just migrate from my old powerbook.

And that's where things get surprising. Moving from one powerbook to another is a lot more difficult than I thought it'd be. I'm having to go back through a couple years of archived email to find registration numbers and info on all the software I bought for the old one, and I haven't yet tried to convince my iPod that it has a new home and I'm not trying to steal music with it. For all of Apple's great software, I'm surprised they haven't produced a nice tool to migrate from one mac to another. You'd figure with their history of faulty hardware and constantly upgrading customers, there'd be a demand for such a thing.

update: thanks to the number of people emailing to mention a firewire connection from one machine to another will do the trick, and apparently pick up all the magical preferences that contain serial numbers and dependencies and such. I'll give that a go today.