I gave up on Apple Music after 3 years and moved back to Spotify a month ago.

Apple Music pros:

• really good UI (including light/dark mode)
• spatial & lossless audio
• included in Apple One subscription

Apple Music cons:

• no crossfade (still! In 2023!) - useless for parties
• thinks I want to listen to my Christmas playlist in June
• generally terrible music suggestion compared to Spotify
• no ‘playlist radio’ (again, compared to Spotify)
• music discovery massively sub-par compared to Spotify

When you say it’s going to ‘take forever’ how long are we talking? Can you try a small batch and see how long it takes? If you really are only doing this every 5 years or so and don’t want to spend any money then the setup you have may be your best option.

If you want to spend $10 or so you could buy a cat6 Ethernet cable (and you may also need to buy a dongle for the laptop). The transfer would take a few hours.

Depending on your internet speed you could also sign up for a single month of Dropbox and do it that way (again, about $10).

For the quickest (and most expensive way) you could purchase an external nvme/SSD which would do the job in a few minutes. Couple hundred dollars but then you’ve got a very useful device that you can use in future.

…“Sorry, I meant what’s your second name? Of course I knew your first name Gary! You’re so silly Gary”

iPhone’s don’t use RCS, so AFAIK, no they can’t. When an Android messages an iPhone, the iPhone falls back to sms which does not support reactions.