>Yeah, extra work for overworked IT departments. I'm sure they'll be happy to add extra work they dont have to do.

But at the benefit of less-burdened security teams, and greatly enhanced peace of mind for users and info-sensitive organizations? You can argue it's taking something highly risky like security and shifting those man hours to something not as threatening.

Most Security Depts were just fine with HDD/ssd destruction. With new apple machines there is no possibility of this.

But security is about more than what you do at the end of a machine’s ownership, it’s all the things you have to consider while the machine is out in the world with very sensitive information on it. And now those security departments have much less to worry about because of this security architecture in the chip.

As the sibling commenter points out, this should also result in less waste as those drives do not need to be destroyed if the device is properly unlocked.

What information would be recoverable without the storage device? ROM dumps? I doubt the majority of these computers are running any super secret firmware and if they are I assume there would be extra precautions taken when its EoL.

I'm talking about machines in active use that are out in the world, with their owners -- security teams have much less to worry about than they used to, as the modern Apple security architecture takes much of the burden off them.

The problem isn’t retiring devices it is stolen or lost devices. Anything that makes it harder for thieves or protects my data is a huge win for me.

> With new apple machines there is no possibility of this.

It isn't necessary to destroy the physical media anymore, so that reduction in e-waste is fine with me. Just properly erase the device by clicking the button in settings.

And there is a perfectly secure way of having FileVault always on by default, and by rotating the keys, you are effectively "destroying" all the data on them anyway, with the bonus of not physically harming anything.

Unless, cryptography itself is broken... which would bring much wider-scale problems than destroying information on old drives anyway.

Without activation lock thieves would be more included to steal MacBooks. I’m all for making it impossible for them to use stolen devices.

They steal them anyway tho.

The world changes and so do procedures.

The only actual step is to click "Erase All Content and Settings", aka. wipe the machine, which is what every sane IT department should do when disposing of a device. Assuming they're using any kind of MDM solution, they can do it with one click through their MDM.

The IT department has no idea what kind of password that user was using, and they have no idea what kind of valuable data is on that machine. If that user's password was just "password", that IT department is also going to end up in hot water if they didn't wipe the machine before handing it off to a third party when all that proprietary data ends up in the wrong hands.

If wiping the machine before getting rid of it is "extra work", then that IT department isn't doing their jobs to begin with.

That is not enough. You have to remove the device from your iCloud account too.

Source: just wiped and sent back a MacBook Air to my old workspace. My colleague finished the macOS setup and logged in with their iCloud account. After resetting it again (to re-do the setup in the way they wanted) it was locked to my account. So not even installing macOS and logging in to iCloud will bind the machine to you.

Imagine doing that with a machine you bought second hand and the original owner can’t be reached anymore.

No, that button is enough. That button did not exist on older versions, so you definitely did not click it if it did not work. If you're running the version of macOS that was released over a year ago (Monterey) or running Ventura (released more recently), then the button will exist.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208987

"Other ways to disable Activation Lock"

"Activation Lock is disabled when you use the Erase All Content and Settings feature."

Apple confirms that the feature works exactly as I said and exactly as users expect. I've used it myself, and it does work.

Users running software that is several major versions out of date will have a more difficult experience, since that button did not exist, and they would have to first remove Activation Lock before going into Recovery Mode to manually format the Mac. Those are the remaining steps that were linked several comments up from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34505523

Apple has made the process as easy as it possible can be now, identical to the process used to factory reset an iPhone.

Well, apparently it’s possible to “hold it wrong” then.

I’d argue if you can wipe it (which requires your iCloud account approval), install it as someone else, login with that new iCloud account, then reset it and it suddenly reverts back to the previous owner, something is wrong or very unintuitive.

The problem on Mac it seems is that there are two official ways to do it. One proper way (the “Erase All Content and Settings”) and one other way (the way we did it, boot into recovery and format it, then go through setup with another iCloud account which apparently just temporarily lets another user use the machine). On iPhone there is no user accessible recovery mode so that can’t happen there.

Going into macOS Recovery is not an official way to transfer ownership. It can be used to reinstall the OS or delete the data volume on the disk. But it does not change anything on the hardware security chip, which is what Activation Lock uses.

>and one other way (the way we did it, boot into recovery and format it, then go through setup with another iCloud account which apparently just temporarily lets another user use the machine).

If you go through recovery, you can delete the content, but when you go to reinstall, you will be prompted for the credentials for the user tied to it.

Meaning, you can delete, but you can't reinstall without being prompted for authorization by the account that currently 'owns' that computer.

Clicking that button will prompt you through deactivating Activation Lock.

I rather IT is forced to properly reset laptops even if takes longer because there has been too many incidents of data leaks when IT doesn't take time to properly remove data before donating laptops.

I've worked with some of these responsible recyclers before. Everyone knows the deal.

If you want IT asset disposition, it'll nominally cost you -- for pickup and processing, and optional value-adds like secure data destruction certificates. If the assets have remarket value, that can begin to subsidize the cost, easily zeroing it out, or even returning profit to the IT department. Recyclers are happy to pay IT departments to pick up their old Apple equipment -- and they know to ask ahead of time, "are these activation locked?"

These recyclers often have vertical integration on the refurbishing side, running an Amazon eCommerce department so they can directly capture that remarket value. And once they've got that going, their bottleneck to growth is how much material they can bring in -- which is never enough.

So the recyclers and refurbishers invariably need to buy material from other recyclers. There's an entire economy around selling pallet-fulls of used, minimally-inspected or completely "as is", Apple and PC equipment. Specialized invite-only communities exist for selling this material in bulk, with lots of overseas actors in on the game. Every R2 recycler is involved here, along with lots of actors from India and China in particular.

Having seen inside that sausage factory, fraud and theft is a legitimate problem. There's more than a fair share of "don't ask questions". More than a fair share of "yup we're definitely R2 certified, wink wink". More than a fair share of wining and dining the R2 auditors to get that certificate under the table in the first place.

I'm gonna go with the GP comment here -- the system is working as intended. Industrialized theft of this sort is much more eminently solvable through technological means than through overstretched law enforcement, especially when a non-negligible amount of material comes from overseas.

It's on the IT departments to figure out if they have enough time to activation-unlock their assets before disposition. Do they want to pay the recycler to pick up all that material, or do they want to sell the material and pad their budget?

A quick look at the Jamf documentation suggests it's pretty easy to mass unlock these devices, so I'm not buying that it's that much of a strain.

Adding $100 in value for 5 minutes of work seems like a good investment. They could pay gig workers to push the buttons.

Hardware lifecycle process may vary but it still needs to be accounted for.

The activation lock removal is hardly an obscure hack, this is a process failure. Good on Apple for making these machines take their secrets to the grave.

For IT departments there is a way to request a reset from apple if you have apple enterprise support and can prove that the device is yours. It has to be in DEP or you have to send them an invoice.

> Yeah, extra work for overworked IT departments.

I'm not sure you're being serious. Wiping a laptop before getting rid of it is SOP for a IT department. This is hardly a new requirement.

Again, the only people impacted are those who want to leverage their ability to take over a laptop without authorization.