Today, I had to transfer the contents on my old laptop to a new one. Fortunately both the laptops were Macs. About 5 years, back when all of my computing was still being done on windows; if such a situation had arisen, I would get a sinking feeling in my stomach because I was near certain to spend a good part of an entire day involved in the activity.
The typical work flow would involve the following:
Backing up all the existing files onto a drive (plus spring cleaning)
Install the OS (If it was not pre-installed)
Find and install all of the drivers the system requires
Setup all of the peripherals
Reconfigure all of the mails IDs and other such configurable things
Re-install all of the applications that you had
Copy the data back onto the system
Most importantly – Pray that it all works out as imagined!
I had developed a level of expertise in doing this, not because I used to buy a new system every now and then, but since Windows would never fail when it came to crashing. My last Windows laptop which I used must have been formatted 2 dozen times in 4 years.
So, safe to say, I was not really looking forward to learning this exercise with the Mac. In the past 3 years, I had never had any reason to screw around with the Operating System. The Mac just works!
But I had to migrate my data to a new laptop since I had acquired a new Mac. Enter Migration Assistant. I had to backup my Mac using Time Machine and then just connect the new system to the backup and point the Application towards the correct backup. Voila! An hour later, I had my new Mac restored with all of the files, setting, applications, mailing configurations et al. It was ready to roll and took no effort from my part.
In fact today morning when I connected the system to the printer, the print window prompted me that some the print could not be processes because the printer software was missing. The system asked me if I wanted it to find and install the software and when I asked the system to go ahead, it went ahead found the drivers and installed it all by itself in a matter of seconds.
A month back I had to negotiate a Windows 8.1 system and the few moments that I did spend with it were not the happiest part of my day. It still made me jump through hoops finding various drivers and software needed to get the little things done.
This is a fine example of showing your customers, you care. Taking the pains out of a process that is known to inflict a lot of pain. The point here is not whether it is difficult or easy to device this, or if the Apple eco-system enables this to be done (Hardware + Software); the point is that someone cared enough to make it work. To take the friction out of the task so that I as the user could have a better experience.
When you care, it shows.
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