Story: Upgrade pain is software's shame

Posted by: Doug (Tuesday 2 March 2004, 11:25 PM)

This was possible, after a fashion, with previous (ie prior to OS X) versions of the Macintosh OS. When I was using OS 9 and needed to take my workstation with me I would simply copy my entire internal hard drive contents to an external hard drive and take it with me. I could plug this into pretty well any Mac of a similar vintage to mine and boot from the external hard drive, giving me my complete computing environment, OS, apps, and all. This is a tad more difficult with OS X as it's no longer possible to do a drag 'n' drop copy of the whole OS, but with Carbon Copy Cloner this can be done. Of course it would be nice to have an internet based system with intelligent agents that manage software licenses, platform differences etc. but I think it'll be some time coming.