Bye bye Mac (1): Getting Rid of My MacBook

Submitted by Hans Salvisberg on Sun, 2019-09-15 21:12

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I've bought about a dozen (DOS and Windows) PCs and one Mac in the past 40 years, and I still have all of them, but now I want to get rid of one of them: the MacBook. It's a very nice machine, a MacBook Pro 2017 with Retina Display, Touch Bar, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD, but I just can't come to terms with its random key combinations, its lack of Esc/Insert/etc. keys, and its instability when pushing it with MAMP Pro and a Windows 10 virtual machine running under Parallels Desktop in Coherence Mode. Even trying to give away the Mac is a challenge!

In What to do before you sell, give away, or trade in your Mac Apple gives the following instructions:

  1. Create a backup (Time Machine)
  2. Sign out of iTunes (Deauthorize)
  3. Sign out of iCloud
  4. Sign out of iMessage
  5. If you're keeping paired Bluetooth devices, unpair them (optional)
  6. Erase your hard drive and reinstall macOS

The current page (as I write this) has the Published Date: November 29, 2018 — not so new, but the latest that we've got. Let's take it one at a time:

  1. Create a backup (Time Machine)
    Yes, Time Machine is fine, especially for restoring the whole shebang to another Mac. Better save your data in a format and on a disk that is readable by more than just another Mac.
  2. Sign out of iTunes (Deauthorize)
    I guess they mean App Store, Apple Music, Apple This, and Apple That, too...
  3. Sign out of iCloud
    Yes.
  4. Sign out of iMessage
    And Facetime, too! Apple forces activation of these two at every corner.
  5. If you're keeping paired Bluetooth devices, unpair them (optional)
  6. Erase your hard drive and reinstall macOS
    Hold down Cmd-R while booting up, erase, BUT:
    Here's the hard part: Apple doesn't mention it, but there are two huge stumbling blocks here!

How to handle these, plus additional information that I would have liked to have, is in these posts: