How to choose which application will be transferred.

Assuming you're looking at migrating from one Mac to another, then no.

The migration options apply at a very large bucket level. You can choose to migrate 'Applications' or not; Copy your 'Documents' or not, but there's no fine-grained control beyond that (e.g. 'only copy documents that are less than 3 months old'; 'copy only applications that I've run in the last 6 months', etc.)

The mgiration assistant is designed to make the new system look like your old system as much as possible.

You're free to copy documents/apps/whatever manually, but the automated method has very few options.

No, only if you do it manually. I have the data transferred over and re-install all the applications manually.

> If I delete applications that I never use from the old Mac, will the old installation files and all that kind of stuff that might be slowing down the old mac be transferred over ?

Unless your disk is full (or approaching full), it's largely a historical myth that old applications and documents slow down your system. It used to be a problem, when filesystems had limits on how many files, etc. could be in a directory before it got bogged down, but that's largely constrained to history as system performance has improved.

That's not to say there isn't value in throwing out old apps, but performance is not a critical reason.

(the adjunct to that is if you're low on disk space (e.g. less than 10% of space available) in which case freeing up space can help).

> Intuition tells me "get rid of the old stuff" but maybe I should do the deletions on the new machine not the old one.

I would agree with that - at least that way you know you have a copy on the old system/backup if you ever need it.

> What is the best way to do removals of 'old applications"

For the most part, it's a matter of looking in /Applications, and simply dragging the relevant applications to the trash. That's it.

MacOS is not like Windows - there are no endless directories of cryptically-named files, .dlls, etc. spread all over the system.

Many applications will store user preferences outside of the main application - you can find them in the Library/Preferences folder inside your home directory. For the most part, though, preference files add up to a few KB at best, so likely won't move the needle in terms of disk space.

The last place to look would be in Library/Application Support. Some apps may store temporary files, caches, and other data in this location. There may be nothing there, but if there is a directory for any given app and you've removed the app, then there's no need to keep the support files.

> Any other good articles to read about how to make the most of a new Mac, and where are the best short (10 mins or less) lessons on topics like "how to use finder" - I still find finding and then moving files around on a Mac much harder than in Windows.

I'm not sure - I've been a Mac user for so long I haven't looked for third-party resources. I'm sure there's something out there, though. Do you have specific use cases in mind?

If I delete applications that I never use from the old Mac, will the old installation files and all that kind of stuff that might be slowing down the old mac be transferred over ?

Intuition tells me "get rid of the old stuff" but maybe I should do the deletions on the new machine not the old one.

What is the best way to do removals of 'old applications"

Any other good articles to read about how to make the most of a new Mac, and where are the best short (10 mins or less) lessons on topics like "how to use finder" - I still find finding and then moving files around on a Mac much harder than in Windows.

Thanks