Got a new Mac Mini as a gift. Using a late-2012 Mac Mini now.
I’ve used this process with other Macs with zero problems.
So, my question.
The back of this new Mini shows two " Thunderbolt/ USB-4 " small jacks. I bought a dongle from the Apple Store, which is labeled as " Thunderbolt to FireWire adaptor ". I figured I’d use the fasted output jack on the old Mini.
What came, and this is a genuine Apple product, is the squared-off on bottom of jack typical Mini-DVI jack to female FireWire 800. Useless.
Here’s my question. My normal USB-C to USB cable that I use to charge my cell phone also carries data. Can’t I use this to connect the two? I would believe that the data rate will be much slower but I am in no hurry at all.
A very careful search on the Apple Store site, as well as scrolling through Amazon pages yields nothing in terms of a true Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 dongle or cable. Maddening.
Any reason why I cannot just use this USB to USB-C cable I have here? ( Rate of data transfer aside )
Sadly USB is a master-slave protocol. Two Macs is two masters. So it won’t allow peer to peer communication. Thunderbolt and FireWire at peer to peer (Thunderbolt uses the FireWire protocols to do this, which was Apple’s contribution to the standard. ) Macs will make themselves visible over any peer to peer connection that they can. FireWire, Thunderbolt, TCP-IP and so on. USB is just too primitive. If you can get both of the machines on a network and visible to one another I’m pretty sure Migration Assistant will work.
I have had the same problem with connecting FireWire to the latest Thunderbolt. You need two adapter cables in line. One converts the old MiniDvi to FireWire, the other between new and old Thunderbolt. Indeed there doesn’t seem to be a single adapter cable that works made.
I am assuming you purchased this adapter, which is a Thunderbolt 2 to Firewire 800 adapter. This is not useless but it is not the optimal adapter as it both requires this Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter to connect to the new Mac Mini. However, it is not the optimal method as Firewire is not the fastest port on the older Mac.
You should return the Firewire adapter and use the Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter with a Thunderbolt 3 cable. Don’t confuse this with a plain USB-C cable, even though the physical connector is the same, a USB-C cable will not work. This is somewhat expensive but will provide the fastest transfer speed.
A less expensive option is to use an Ethernet cable connected between the two computers, which will provide similar to slightly higher performance as Firewire 800. Disconnect the computers from WiFi when doing this to ensure use of the wired network. A switch/hub is not required.
Ethernet is the easiest (and cheapest) way to get this to work. A crossover cable is not required; both machines have auto-sensing NICs. So just grab any random Ethernet cable you have lying around, or get a nice and cheap six-footer, and you’re off to the races.
Who knew you got free Apple support for a while? Used to be when you bought a new Mac, they were happy to sell you AppleCare™ ® for the princely sum of 60% of the purchase price of your computer. Otherwise, you were SOL.
Anywhoo, I talked to some very nice people who work at The Spaceship ( or thereabouts ) who told me to do this all over WiFi. Worked like a chahm.
With only a few sweat-drenched moments, all transferred over and is visible and workable on the new machine. Which is wicked fast, since it’s an SSD “motherboard” and an SSD HDD.