Migrate to new Macbook Pro

I am going to be migrating from an older macbook pro to an newer macbook pro. Which is the best way to migrate 1) from mac to mac or 2) via time machine backup? Thanks

When you get the new Mac (you wrote "will be getting..." so I assume you don't have it yet), the "out of the box experience" when you first boot will offer to do the migration for you -- and it'll invoke Migration Assistant to do this. It's actually a little less confusing if you the migration right at this time (rather than continue without restoring and then manually running Migration Assistant later). This is because Migration Assistant wont let you restore an account if an account with the same name already exists.... meaning if you type in your same firstname / lastname and let it make an account with the same name, THEN try to run Migration Assistant, it wont restore your own files to your account because an account with the same name already exists (it will block the restore if either the accounts "short name" matches OR if the full name (first & last) are identical. If you do the restore when the out-of-the-box experience prompts for it no account will have been created yet and you wont have this problem. (if you DO choose to do it later, then just create a temporary account on the new Mac so you wont have an account name collision. You can delete the temporary account after you complete the migration.)
"Migration Assistant" does have an option to use the Time Machine drive as a source for your data.
It's a smarter restore because it can create the user accounts, machine specific configuration (network settings, wireless networks, printers, etc.), as well as all your applications. This is considerably easier than trying to use the Time Machine interface to manually select everything you want to restore.
If you do a machine-to-machine restore (with the old Mac booting in "target firewire mode") then you'll have no use of either computer until the restore is complete. If you do a restore from a bootable backup drive (the sort of thing you could create with a utility such as 'SuperDuper') or a TimeMachine backup volume then you wont have both machines tied up. Depending on how much data you have to restore, it could take a few hours.

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