Transitioning to a new Mac has always been a very smooth experience – the first run setup offers to migrate everything for you and generally it gets everything right so your new Mac comes up looking just like your old one.

Recently I’ve acquired a new MacBook Pro with Retina display and decided that after all these years of migrating everything over I’d set up from scratch. Mostly just to make me consciously choose to reinstall things instead of a heap of cruft coming across automatically which I don’t actually use anymore.

So I chose not to use the migration assistant for anything and was dropped into a brand new account. Except that it didn’t feel like a brand new account at all. I’d signed into my iCloud account as part of that first run process so it had pulled in everything iCloud was storing for me. That was just a handful of files, but the settings that came across made things feel at home. All my reminders, calendars and notes were there and Safari had all my bookmarks. Even the applications could be re-installed direct from the App Store “purchased” list, or at least most of them.

I don’t use iCloud for my mail, but I do use GMail so when I logged into my Google account in Safari it offered to add it as a local account. Suddenly all my mail was fully setup as well (as well as some old contacts, calendars and notes which I turned off again).

What made the whole process so amazingly smooth though was the new-in-Mavericks iCloud keychain. Even when I had to set things up manually, or re-login to a website, my new Mac already had the username and password stored.

If I stored my files and email in iCloud, the transition would have been almost entirely iCloud based – just a few preferences to reconfigure the way I want them and the odd application to install for myself.

Just goes to show that the cloud doesn’t have to mean the web – I use desktop applications for nearly everything but because sync is so pervasive these days, we’re often using cloud computing even though we’re using applications the same way we always have.