What is a cloned drive, anyway?
 

I know enough about computers to use them, but beyond that, I'm pretty clueless. I'm interested in buying a MacBook Pro with lots of pre-loaded software and a smaller hard drive than I'd like. I would like to buy the computer, copy all the software over to a larger drive, then swap out the small drive for the big one. Will this work? Is that "cloning" means? Thanks for being patient with a neophyte.

"Cloning" has different meanings, which is why I don't use it. We copy the files from one drive to another. You can do that from one smaller drive to a larger one.

As I indicated in response to your email, this should work with any program that doesn't "tie itself" to the drive (for copy protection purposes).