Transfer of info

if you don't wish to use the migration assistant

then if it was me then I would connect an external hd / usb stick to the old and copy the stuff I wanted and then connect it to the new and copy it onto that

One suggestion. If you are, say, copying from your old Documents folder to the new Documents folder, don't replace the entire Documents folder; instead, select individual files and folders that are in the Documents folder and copy those from the old Documents folder to the new one. Same for the Pictures folder, etc.

If you want to have your old bookmarks and individual app preferences on your new Mac, those are located in various places in your user Library folder. You'll have to find them and manually copy them over. You'll also need to recreate your email accounts and copy over local copies of emails that aren't on the email servers.

Migration Assistant does all this automatically but you can also do it manually.