Best practice moving from Intel to M4 Mac

I moved from an Intel Mac to a Silicon Mac with Migration Assistant. I included the Apps in the migration. But before I used any Adobe programs, I reinstalled the Creative Cloud app and the Adobe programs and then rebooted. My preferences carried over. 

Usually Migration Assistant is a good solution, however, you are correct in questioning it for this one time when the hardware platform is changing from Intel to Apple Silicon. If Migration Assistant is used to migrate everything including applications, it’s going to move all those Intel-based apps and extensions to Apple Silicon where they will all end up running under the slower and more memory-hungry Rosetta translation environment for Intel apps. That means you are going to have to run those installers and updaters anyway, because if Intel versions got migrated, you have to uninstall them and then install the Apple Silicon versions. So, only because of this one-time platform change, migrating doesn’t avoid having to run installers.

Instead, you could still run Migration Assistant to move over all your data, like your photos, but set it to exclude the migration of apps (I think that’s possible, I haven’t used Migration Assistant in a while). Then, on the M4, do a fresh install of any apps you need like Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. That will have these advantages:

You won’t run the risk of carrying over any old Intel code that is either slower/less compatible, or doesn’t run at all because it’s not compatible with macOS 10.15 and later. Any apps that get migrated that can’t run on Apple Silicon will just take up space, and if you don’t know which ones they are it will be a chore to track them down and uninstall them completely. This could include old apps you forgot you even had on your Mac.

By doing a fresh install, you ensure that all of the apps installed on your Mac are fully compatible and optimized for Apple Silicon, and also ensure that there aren’t any incompatible apps on your Mac.