The new laptop arrived and now it's time for the big migration.
This includes not only a change in the physical device, but also a change in OS version and more importantly in CPU architecture.
Luckily there are some very helpful tools making this a quite smooth experience.

Overal plan of attack:

• Make a Time Machine backup to an external USB disk.
• Start the new laptop and use the Migration Assistant to restore from the Time Machine backup.
• Go to sleep / do something else, while the restore process is running.
• After the restore is completed, login and fix all the problems caused by the OS version and CPU architecture change :-)

This plan worked quite well for me (as I'm already writing this blogpost with the new laptop).
There are of course some expected and some unexptected problems that need to be addressed.

Rosetta 2
Directly after the first start, there was a system message asking me if Rosetta 2 should be enabled.
Rosetta 2 is the emulation layer built into macOS that allows to run Intel-only binaries on the Apple Silicon CPUs.
To reduce the ammount of immediate problems to fix, I enabled it for now.
Even though over time I plan to replace all Intel-only binaries with newer versions.

1Password
One unexpected problem was 1Password. There I was prompted to install the old version 7 from the App Store.
It took some time to figure out that the current version 8 is no longer distributed through the App Store.
Instead I had to remove the (freshly installed) 1Password 7 App from /Applications. And then needed to download their custom installer from their website.
The installer in turn then did download and install the latest 1Password version 8.

Homebrew
On the list of expected problems was Homebrew.
Here not only I had a big collection of pre-compiled (for Intel) opensource binaries that needed to be changed into pre-compiled binaries for Apple Silicon. But also the root folder of the whole Homebrew installation changed from /usr/local to /opt/homebrew.
And to make matters worse, some of the non-opensource software distributed by Homebrew in so called casks keeps using the old /usr/local.
For the migration of the binaries, I followed the FAQ entry here.
As expected this did not go over completely smooth and quite some research, manual fixing and cleanup was needed.
I will write more about the problems/fixes and tricks I found out in a future blogpost.
Update: please have a look at the dedicated blogpost for all the tricks and learnings of the Homebrew migration.

GPGTools
Not completely unexpected, but surprisingly smooth was the migration of MacGPG and the GPG plugin for Mail.app.
They provide a dedicated version of the software which brings compatibility with macOS Sequoia.
After running the installer to update the software, only a re-entering of the license key is needed and everything works as before.

Besides the already mentioned surprises with Homebrew, there are still some other issues left to be fixed (and possibly new ones to be discovered).
Overall the laptop is working very well and my familiar environment is mostly there 😌