I got a new unibody MacBook today, and for the first time ever, getting a new Mac hasn’t left me happy. Dear Apple: Please bring back either FireWire target mode or a replacement that, you know, works.

It used to be, when you got a new Mac, you started up your old Mac in “FireWire target mode”, and plugged it in, and this thing called Migration Assistant turned your new Mac into your old Mac, only newer and faster and better. It might take as much as a couple of hours, but who cares? This is a killer feature. Er, this was a killer feature.

The new MacBooks don’t have FireWire. That’s OK, when it comes up it invites you to wire up your old mac via Ethernet, fire up Migration Assistant, and let ’er rip. Only it progressed from “4 hours 37 minutes remaining” to “2 hours 50 minutes remaining” and then said “The other Macintosh has gone offline.” Repeatably.

Well OK then, it says it’ll also restore from a Time Capsule backup. I have one of those. It got on the WiFi all right, and has now spent five hours in “Checking Time Machine Backup” mode. My confidence that this is going to work is subsiding fast.

In the old days, I would have been happily running on the new machine by now, cheerily blogging about my shiny new Mac. As it is, it looks to me like Apple, not to put too fine a point on it, removed a killer feature from a flagship product. This doesn’t feel like a good idea.

Um, dear LazyWeb: Advice would be welcome.