How to Erase and Factory Reset Your Mac - New EASY Method

if you're selling your Mac or if you're giving your Mac to someone else it's best to erase all your content and reset your Mac to factory settings now in the recent years Apple has made this process a whole lot easier it used to be pretty timeconsuming you had multiple steps five six years ago but it's much much easier now so I'm going to show you how to do that but I'll include that video just in case your Mac is really old and this doesn't work for you there's an old way to do this but that's for Max before 2018 now the very first thing I recommend is go to your search box and type in time machine and click on time machine over here so if you don't know what time machine is you need to set up time machine and time machine will back up your old computer here so I use an external hard drive so then it will take everything that's on this hard drive of this Mac and puts it over here using time machine and it's the easiest way to then use what's in here to put it onto your new Mac when you get a new Mac if you already have another Mac you could put them side by side and migrate the information I'll show you that in the next setting but because we're going to erase everything there's no other way to get it back you need to back it up somehow you could do it manually or you could do it with time machine or migration now the next thing I recommend is go to the Apple logo right here and go to system settings on this page click on General here on the left side and if you have a really old Max this might look a little bit different but either way the general option should be available in your menu too and go to system system update and this is going to check for updates here and if it finds a new update it is recommended that you update your Mac your operating system if you have the room so if you don't have the room I still recommend you try to erase some things from your Mac so you could go ahead and update it here because this will solve some problems if you have the latest operating system that you may come across otherwise so I recommend you update here and that is step two for step three click the Apple icon one more time time and go to system settings so for this step we need to sign out of our iCloud accounts but the new Mac setting is going to let us do all the steps now that we need to do so go to General and there's an option here called transfer and reset click that and right over here this is the migration assistant so if you want to transfer your information all your data all your apps to a new Mac or even a Windows PC you could set them next to each other side by side or you could use time machine backup but I recommend it that's when you need another hard drive so if you don't have your new Mac ready just get a external hard drive I'll put a link in the description to one that you could pick up from Amazon now this is the migration option but to reset everything we need to click erase all content on settings it's going to ask for the password for this computer that we're on I'm going to type that in now this is going to take care of multiple steps that before we need to do manually so we needed to sign out of our iCloud this this is going to just do that for us it's going to remove everything relating to touch ID it's going to remove any Bluetooth that are paired and it's going to remove this activation lock here this location sharing will be turned off I could go ahead and continue here now to sign out of our Apple ID we need our Apple ID password so I do need to type that in here then you're going to get this popup you're about to erase all the content and the settings on this computer on this Mac so this cannot be undone so I just want to make sure you have backed this up migrated over and you have all this information this is going to be gone forever there's no way to get it back so make sure before you press this you understand that and everything is backed up now I'm going to press it and then you should see the Apple logo with this little slider here let that complete okay then it's going to bring you to this page after the Apple logo flashes a few times so in this case it took about five minutes for me go ahead and press restart over here or it's going to restart automatically after the countdown is done now here you're going to come to this page so you could go ahead and get started here to set up this Mac as a new Mac and at this point this is actually where you want to leave it every time you get a new Mac this is basically the first page of the setup screen so you don't want to actually set it up the operating system has already been installed and you could actually close this up and shut down your Mac here and you're ready to give it away or you could sell it if you want to keep it for yourself and you did this reset because there was an issue obviously go through the setup process and it's going to ask you to create a new log plugin screen and everything is very straightforward on the steps on setting up your Mac if you follow the prompts and that's all it takes to reset your Mac to its factory setting again if you have an older Mac I do have that old video that shows you how to do it with that that one requires a restart you have to hold control and R it's a different process alog together so that is an older video that I'll include in the description as well thanks for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: Howfinity

Views: 13,250

Keywords: How to Erase and Factory Reset Your Mac, howfinity, how to, tutorial, Youtube, restore mac, how to factory reset a mac, mac pro, factory reset your mac, how to reinstall mac, How to reinstall macos, erase mac hard drive, erase hard disk, factory reset macos

Id: GiTg_I_tUns

Length: 4min 54sec (294 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2024