Click on System Preferences in the menu bar at the top of your screen.

It also removes all your data and user-installed applications. Activation Lock will also be removed and Bluetooth devices will be unpaired. If you click on the new Erase All Content and Settings option then everything will be taken care of, including removal of your stored fingerprints for Touch ID, your Apple ID, anything in the Wallet app, and Find My. How to erase an M1 Mac, or a Mac with T2 chipĪ new option arrived in System Preferences in macOS Monterey that takes care of a lot of the complicated steps involved in wiping your Mac – as long as it is an M1 Mac or one with a T2 chip, as detailed above. These Intel Macs have the T2 security chip: If you have a M1 Mac, or an Intel Mac with a T2 chip inside, and you are running macOS Monterey this process is a little easier with many of the steps taken care of by a new option in System Preferences. M1 Macs and Intel Mac with T2 chip running macOS Monterey If your Mac is older then the steps you need to take are a little more complicated, we’ll run though the If you have a M1 Mac, or an Intel Mac with a T2 chip inside, and you are running macOS Monterey, this process is a little easier with many of the steps taken care of by a new option in System Preferences. The best thing about backing up with Time Machine is it makes it really easy to

This can be done very simply using Apple’s Time Machine software – here’s Luckily backing up your Mac is easy to do – as long as you have a external hard drive to use. In these days of working predominantly in the cloud it is an easy mistake to make! Unfortunately you can’t yetīack up everything on your Mac to iCloud. This is because – as you would expect – resetting a Mac to factory settings gets rid of all the data stored on that machine.ĭon’t fall in to the trap we fell into: Because we use iCloud to sync all files across all our Apple devices we assumed that we could just recover everything we needed from the cloud – which was true to a certain extent, but it wasn’t until after we wiped the Mac that we realised that the data for one non-Apple app we used wasn’t in the cloud.

We’ll run through the new steps below.īefore you do anything you should back up or clone your Mac. Restore your Mac to its factory settingsįirst a bit of good news: If you have macOS Monterey on an M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, or a Mac with a T2 chip, the process for erasing the content on your Mac has just got so much easier thanks to a new option in System Preferences.

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