All they did was hook your old mac up to your new one with a cable and run the standard software. You sat with them and watched.

There's no reason they couldn't do something similar/more modern with an iPhone and not have a security risk.

> There's no reason they couldn't do something similar/more modern with an iPhone and not have a security risk.

Of course there's a security risk. The security model of both the Macs and the iPhones have significantly improved. The hardware security models make this a difficult engineering task - and a dangerous one.

The modern day equivalent would be walking you through backing up to iCloud and restoring from iCloud. It’s not a security risk unless iCloud is one already.

What you describe sounds like a huge waste of everybody's time. Furthermore data migration on mobile devices mostly happens via iCloud these days - there's really no need to do that in store. It's part of the onboarding process whenever you boot up a new iOS device.