Why is Migration Assistant taking soooo long?

I just bought a new MacBook Pro 13". I decided to transfer most of my stuff from my old iBook G4. I tried to use a firewire cable but MA said "Mac OSX is not installed on your old Mac." Huhhh? That machine has never seen anything but OSX...
So I use an ethernet cable directly between the two computers. That works. Except that it is taking INSANELY long. I am only transferring about 30 gigs and it has been going for 6 hours and says it will need 8 more! What can possibly take so long??? When I transfer files over my network using the same cables, 30 gigs takes maximum 30 minutes I think....
Thanks,
Bo

Okay a few things here - first if you're using mavericks on both machines you don't need to do anything with target disk mode. Just using migration assistant on both machines connected by thunderbolt is enough.
Second, I have a 2011 MacBook Air and it does have a single thunderbolt port. Pre-2011 may have been the mini display port.
Finally, and the reason I stumbled onto this, the thunderbolt connection works wonderfully fast but there's some kind of bug in migration assistant that defaults to the wifi connection if both machines are connected to the network, even if you have a thunderbolt cable connected. I'm transferring a 2011 MacBook Air to a new rMBP and just discovered this issue. I connected with the thunderbolt cable, it estimated around an hour for about 80gb of data then inched closer to 36 mins as the estimate.
At some point along the way though migration assistant decided wifi would be better and the estimate jumped to over 20 hours. I unplugged my router (only solution for me once both machines had migration assistant running) and it seamlessly defaulted back to thunderbolt where the estimate cut back down to 30ish minutes.
The thunderbolt cable being worth the extra money or not is I suppose a matter of opinion but for me it's got plenty of other uses to justify the price and certainly made this transfer a lot faster. I just wish migration assistant wouldn't default to wifi without any kind of indicator.
So I assume too late to help you out but hopefully someone will see this and fix this bug and maybe it'll be helpful to someone else as it's still an issue as of right now.

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