Hi Andrew, Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I disagree but only 100% — I love the photo, but what do I know? As far as not using a teleconverter, I am not sure as to how you came to that conclusion; I have been using teleconverters for three decades and making images that sell, have been honored in international competitions, have made me happy, and made many others smile. But again, you need to ask yourself, what does he know? And BTW, the image in question is an un-cropped D850 image. I would suggest getting glasses, getting a new laptop, and taking an IPT. Where can we see your posted images?

cheers, artie

ps: or perhaps you are 100% correct …

I sympathize with you on your new computer setup. You have unbelievable patience!

:). Or not. But what is the option: yelling and screaming and crying does not make much sense.

It’s too late for this conversion, but I submit the following suggestion to possibly avoid this agony next time:

I am on my sixth Apple computer, beginning with an Apple Iic and progressing through 4 Macs. Loved almost all of them! (except the Apple III).

My previous MacBook Pro was bought in mid 2012. In 2017 I bought a MacBook Pro with a 2TB SDD disk similar to your new one.

Prior to 2017 I began backing up my Mac with Apple’s Time Machine (at that time it was a hardware device, now it’s software). TM, when connected to your computer, backs up your Mac hourly, daily, and weekly, some of which backups are incremental, i.e. only backing up whatever has changed.

If it is only software now how does it “connect” to your computer?

When I bought the new Pro, I simply pointed it to my Time Machine backup hard disk, directed it to restore everything, waited a few hours, and viola! my new Mac was, software-wise, identical to my old one. No codes, keys or passwords needed!

I had the capability to do that with the similar (?) program that I use, Carbon Copy Cloner. That is what I updated with in early FEB. The problem is that I resist updating so it did not make sense to go back several years of operating systems … I was easily able to get everything off that drive. If the next enclosure that I get this afternoon (FRI 22 FEB) is the right one, I will be able to grab everything that I need quickly. Kine hora …

Everything was identical – MacOS, all finder contents, all my software including Photoshop, Lightroom, Word, Excel, all my data files including he all-important Picture file, and every app I had downloaded. Although my files were not encrypted, TM would have handled that.

You can find out about TM here.

I would have one concern about your case, because TM restores the last FULL backup file. I don’t know whether full backups are made only weekly, or what. Since you use your Mac so frequently you may have big differences in weekly backups. You should ask Apple about that.

My Time Machine is a wireless box; it is no longer available. It is now only software. With the new software version you would need to plug in the backup device on which your TM files are held to your Mac.

It sounds a lot like CCC.

But the beauty of TM is restoring everything to a new machine. Just push a button!

But check it out – it may not be for you. But it was a miracle for me.

Thanks for sharing.

with love, artie