Are we intentionally forgetting the part about how these are recycled machines? Sometimes the business doing the recycling doesnt have direct contact with the owners, often businesses are pawning off months old machines and dont know the last user who had the machine, theres so many scenarios where its not fair to say 'just contact the previous owner' - this grey area just leads to waste, and the only one at fault is Apple

>Sometimes the business doing the recycling doesnt have direct contact with the owners,

Then how do they know that they're not dealing in stolen goods? If they can't establish a chain of custody to a legitimate owner, then they're being irresponsible.

> Sometimes the business doing the recycling doesnt have direct contact with the owners,

Did the owners just push the laptop under the door and run away? At the point where they receive the laptop they can say: "If the laptop is locked it will cost you $X to dispose it here. If it is unlocked we pay you $Y."

Set X and Y appropriately and people who can will unlock them.

No, what we're saying is we only have the business's word on that, and that isn't worth very much. There are tons of shady recyclers who look the other way at laptops that "fell off the back of a truck", and I'm very confident that's what's happening here, and you (and Vice) are falling for it. The bit about multiple thousands of business laptops getting junked is a total ragebait distraction, because any business of that size has MDM enabled. What they're really complaining about is individual laptops whose provenance is unknown, and at best they don't care where they came from, at worst they're active participants in the theft rings.

Properly wiping FMM is, in my experience, beyond most owners, especially of they aren't mainly on mac and thus might no longer have access to apple id they used.

In fact, there was a period of time when depending on latest os version and hw version, the steps changed.

The one time I bought a mac personally, the reseller tried to follow the correct procedure... But they used an outdated one. Contacting previous owner led to threats of litigation for phone call mobbing.

Any Macs made in the past 5 years require exactly one step: clicking "Erase All Content and Settings", which is exactly the button anyone would push when trying to wipe a machine before giving it to someone else.

Things may have been more complicated before that, but Apple has made it as easy as it possibly can be now without telling thieves to just start grabbing every Mac they see.

Not past 5 years - MBP 2018 with Catalina didn't unlock when using that. It's possible that it was a bug, but after previous owner nearly threatened lawsuit for "phone mobbing" (I wasn't the first person trying to call them to remove it from FMM) I kinda gave up. Needed to use the machine right away and broken FMM belonging to locked-out Apple ID didn't stop me from that.

Yes past 5 years. That’s what the Apple documentation says, since it says it applies to any Mac that was T2 or newer. That doesn’t mean that it would have worked this way 5 years ago. Software improvements with macOS have undoubtedly made the process simpler than it used to be.

"Erase All Content and Settings" did not exist in macOS Catalina. Back then, you had to manually boot into recovery and reinstall the OS that way, which unfortunately did nothing for Activation Lock, and was a confusingly advanced procedure to expect end users to perform. Now, someone just has to go into settings and click that button and macOS will handle everything.

FMM?

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