New Macbook Pro 2017 won't boot from USB drive

I have a new Macbook Pro 2017 (No touch bar) that will not boot from an external USB-C SSD drive. I cloned a 2012 Macbook air using Carbon Copy Cloner onto the drive and I have confirmed that the drive will boot from the MB Air. The Air has the newest version of Sierra. (10.12.5)

I have a 2016 Macbook Pro w/Touch bar and it will also boot to that machine.

I have tried to bless the drive in recovery mode (That did not work)

I would like to clone the Air -> new MB Pro 2017

For a long term solution, I would like to be able to make bootable backups of the new machine.

EDIT: I was able to clone the new OS on the new Macbook 2017 and it will boot to that.

Solution 1:

There are hardware specific builds of the OS that sometimes will run on one computer and not on another (due to drivers that are needed for certain models, etc). So this means that your MB Air setup will likely not work to boot the new MBP.

See here for some info: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204319

For this reason, you want to transfer over your data using the Migration Assistant (you can do this between computers, or using a Time Machine backup).