The iMac I ordered last week arrived from Ireland today and I spent several hours getting it all set up.
The ram install went pretty easy; remove ram cover, pull out two special all-black Apple 4Gig so-dimms, install two equally special Crucial “Ballistics” 16Gig so-dimms, put back ram cover, and press button.
2020 OSX “Catalina” has an awful lot in common with 2007 Windows “Vista” in that everything you do with the system spawns a permissions popup… It turns out that this handily breaks the TimeMachine restore from one machine to another, because all of your installed apps will grenade on first boot due to components being blocked by dozens of permissions popups.
It’s annoying to have to relive those horrific Vista days from over a decade ago; but we all do what we must in the name of security I suppose.
Anyway, everything was ultimately fixable and I eventually got settled in on the new machine:
The iMac is currently syncing data between itself, iCloud, and Backblaze… I’m not sure why as the data in all three locations should be identical — but what do I know.
While I was picking up the ram from Microcenter today they caught me with a “Black Friday” sale on Apple Watches so I have one of those now too… It’s the cheap one; ‘space gray’ aluminum and a plastic band — but it does unlock the iMac when I sit down at my desk, so that’s handy.
And speaking of Black Friday; I gather that the traditional day-after-Thanksgiving sales event is now the entire month of November or something.
I got my old MacBook Pro erased, reloaded, and into the return box for the $2000 trade-in on the iMac. I’ll drop that off at FedAxe tomorrow and hope that it arrives back at Apple in one piece.