[jorl17]

I have churned through three macs since 2012 and have never once installed fresh. Time machine has helped me move between them. At one point I had to temporarily move back to an old one while the other one was being fixed, and I did the exact same thing (I experienced some hiccups with brew packages that were no longer compatible due to missing CPU optimizations on the old mac).

I periodically clean my mac, though. Remove stale configuration files, cleanup apps, etc. I also have a bunch of stuff written down, as well as scripts, to help with installing new macs (to help my friends reinstall theirs).

I'm very nitpicky about configurations and apps. I've got dozens of apps and micro-apps I use. which are very modified. These include the typical BetterTouchTool, Alfred, Amphetamine, but also smaller apps like Audio Balance. My terminal is heavily customized, both in terms of iTerm 2 settings, but also in terms of my zsh config, custom commands, etc.

I'm sure I'd be able re-create my environment within days, but these would be very rough days....and time machine just works! I don't need anything else.

[dnh44]

With Big Sur I finally did my first fresh install of macOS since Jaguar (10.2). It took me an entire weekend and while it’s nice to have a clean out I think I’ll just do a time machine restore when I finally get an M1 Mac.

[jorl17]

Ah, I expect that this is where things might go south! Since many apps are built for x86/x64, I'm sure that when you migrate to the M1 mac, they will run in intel "emulation" mode or just crash/fail!

I'm not talking about apps that you got from the app store or similar, but, rather, things you installed via homebrew!

When I temporarily had to move back from a more recent (~2014) mac to an older one (~2012), I got bitten by that becuse some apps installed via homebrew had been built from source with optimizations that the older machine didn't support. It was easy to fix, since I could just reinstall them as I saw them breaking, but it was an annoyance nonetheless.

[dnh44]

I actually just got an M1 Mac since that post and I've decided to start from scratch again for the exact same reasons as you've mentioned here.