Upgrade to a newer (not new) MacBook Pro

milehiview wrote:

The questions remain as to the sequence of how to do the upgrades.

Assuming that you and your wife each have your own Apple IDs – as Apple recommends – you could have her follow these steps to completely reset the Mac.

What to do before you sell, give away, trade in, or recycle your Mac - Apple Support

Then you could set it up as your own, as if it were new. While setting it up, you could tell Migration Assistant to migrate from the external drive containing the Time Machine backup of your old Mac.

Transfer to a new Mac with Migration Assistant - Apple Support

I would suggest that before you do this, you make a bootable external drive that you could use to start up the newer Mac if something went wrong during the Recovery process. This could be

• A drive containing a bootable clone backup (Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper!) of the newer Mac, or
• A drive containing a freshly-downloaded "clean install" of macOS (e.g., a "clean install" of Ventura). (You'd make one of these by downloading and running the installer, but telling it to install the OS on a spare drive.)

Also, I would suggest waiting to "take over" your wife's machine until she successfully migrates her stuff to her new machine – just in case her migration goes south, and she wants to pull something off her old machine as a way of recovering.

Hi,

Your wife's MacBook Pro is not supported macOS Sequoia, Sequoia is required 2018 or later Macs.

If you simply upgrade the existing software, you will be permanently tied to her Apple-ID for any future upgrades.

Better to start over Now, and get on a track based on your own Apple-ID.

MacOS is not copy-protected in the usual sense:

Apple software downloaded from the Mac App Store, including MacOS, is not copy protected. However, it IS tagged with the Apple-ID of the purchaser when "purchased" (or equivalent. Think of MacOS as purchased on sale for $0.) A valid Apple-ID is required for almost all downloads from the Mac App Store.

You cannot update, upgrade, or install new software based on already-installed software UNLESS you supply the Apple-ID of the original software.

CAUTION: DO NOT erase the entire disk on a 2018 or later Mac, because some of the data for the Secure Enclave is stored there. Instead, use "erase all content and settings"

The original "shipped in the box" version is available for downloading using Recovery after an "erase all content and settings"

milehiview wrote:

Correction, I just Verified that the wife's MacBook Pro is a 13" 2018, 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports model. Sorry for the misstep on my part.

That's good news. It means that you can upgrade all the way to Sequoia. Sequoia is still one of the "most recent three" (unlike Ventura).

Once you upgrade to Sequoia, I would strongly recommend going into System Settings > Desktop & Dock, and making the following changes:

• Turn OFF "Drag windows to menu bar to fill screen". If this is ON, and you touch the menu bar while moving or resizing a nearly-full-screen window, Sequoia will throw you into a full-screen-window mode that you probably did not want – or, coming from an older version of macOS, expect.
• Change "Click wallpaper to reveal desktop" to "Only in Stage Manager", so that the icons on the Desktop don't play a game of "hide and seek".

If your wife's machine is a 2017 MacBook Pro of some description, you can upgrade it to Ventura – but no further. (You cannot install Sonoma, Sequoia, or Tahoe.)

How to download and install macOS - Apple Support