There was obviously no adapter involved, just a direct Thunderbolt cable between the two Macs.

Even its fast pci-e SSD would not saturate the TB2 channel - meaning the transfer should as fast, but not faster, than when connecting two TB2 macs.Ī) in situation 3, there is no reason to suspect Migration Assistant would not work reliably to bring stuff from a TB2 equipped Mac to a 2016 rMBP.ī) I do not have a 2016 rMBP (though I accept offers :-)), but I did this migration to transfer info from a TB2 mac to another. A TB2 equipped Mac in target mode is one relevant example of one such peripheral.

The converse is NOT true (the 12' MacBook CANNOT use Thunderbolt at all - here's hoping a new 2017 model rectifies this).ģ) With an Apple TB3->TB2 adapter, one can connect TB2 peripherals to a 2016 rMBP they will be limited to TB2 speeds (which is not a big limitation odds are the peripherals cannot saturate the TB2 bus). These use the same USB-C type plug and can be used as regular USB-C. Using Migration Assistant in the way described would not work on a 12' MacBookĢ) A 2016 MacBook Pro has four (or two for the non-touchbar model) Thunderbolt 3 ports. If Luis says he has connected a 2016 MacBook or MacBook Pro with USB-C ports via TDM and a Thunderbolt cable utilizing Setup Assistant to an older MacBook I have no reason to doubt him.ġ) A MacBook has USB-C ports that are NOT Thunderbolt 3. Seeing that both MacBooks are equipped with SSD, 8 MB/s is joke. If found to be true, would make me very sad. According to Move content to your new MacBook or late-2016 MacBook Pro you can only use Migration Assistant with USB-C in Target Disk Mode. My suspicion is that it ignores the Thunderbolt connection and tries peer-to-peer WiFi instead. However the old MacBook shows up, it gives an error about not being able to connect.

I've read some reports about Target Disk Mode being slow, so I've restarted my old MacBook and am trying to get Migration Assistant to run without TDM. As I want to get my money's worth of that ThunderBolt cable, I've cancelled the migration.

After 8 hours of migration it is still going to take 2 hours at a whopping speed of 8 MB/s. I've confirmed that the dialog said it would use the Thunderbolt connection. The old MacBook is set to Target Disk Mode. I have connected a Thunderbolt cable on the old MacBook to a USB-C Thunderbolt adapter on the new MacBook. I'm trying to do a migration from my old MacBook Pro Retina (Late 2013) to my new MacBook Pro (Late 2016).

Mac target disk mode usb-c