Apple gets another boatload of Menick money

Velvet Elvis, the MacBookPro I travel with, is four years old, which is about 54 in people years. It took the Mavericks upgrade (which when all was said and done didn’t change much noticeably), but it’s time to start thinking that it’s near the end of its practical, do-it-all life. So I decided to get a Mini for the chez, and just use Elvis on the weekends, to extend its usefulness; after all, if all it needs to do is run a browser and TRPC, it’s fine. I picked up the Mini on Monday, and threw in an iPad Air for good measure, as my first gen iPad is definitely not keeping up with the times.

Which means, in a word, tech turmoil.

For some reason simply hooking up the two machines to copy files didn’t work, but I didn’t need all that much, and sharing over the wireless did the job. Since I had iTunes on a separate drive, I hooked that up directly, for an estimated day to copy. Using the old Mac as a disk drive, mostly to assure myself that it worked that way, I installed Office. I still need to bring over the rest of my data, including pictures, but most of what I have other than photos is on Dropbox, so there’s not much there. In fact, it always surprises me when I can’t find a file on Dropbox. I work on too many different computers and devices to store much locally, except when I’m not paying attention. (The pix are also backed up on my Amazon drive; better safe than sorry.)

The turmoil comes when you start deciding what hardware to keep and what to toss. I have two little standalone drives that I used for the MacBook backup and the iTunes library. I figure that, once things are set on the Mini, I’ll reassign the backup drive there. I don’t know about the iTunes one. The Mini has enough storage space to handle all my music two or three times over, so I might as well run the music from that machine. I might pass that second drive along to the spouse to use as a backup for her MacBook. No point in wasting it.

As for the iPad, the differences are few except that the weight is very meaningful. Plus some of the things that were dicey on the first gen work fine on the Air. This time the question of what to do with the original is simple. I’ll be passing it to the daughter so she can play Civ and watch movies. So everything remains in the family.

One benefit of a big hardware upgrade is that it gives you the opportunity to survey the workspace and clean things up. I still have attachments for Little Elvis, for instance, my original iBook. I figure that will become my DVD slot (remote) for the Mini. Some of the wires on my desk seem to be attached to nothing; they need to be sorted out. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

While I was playing with this last night, all kinds of things were going on with Vassar, but I totally missed them. Fortunately, things tend to work out fine when you’re otherwise engaged.