It is sitting on my desk, a shiny M4 MacBook. It wants to be configured. I can take the easy route and use the Migration Assistant. But that would carry forward all the cruft the various incarnations of the Migration Assistant have accumulated over the decade. So I went the hard way.

Manual with a dash of AppStore

First Stop: update macOS. In my case Sequoia 15.1 -> 15.6.1

Installation falls into 3 categories

• command line tooling
• settings & data
• GUI applications

Followed by the reconfiguration of license keys