Guide: How to prepare a MacBook for sale in 5 steps

Are you planning to sell or trade in your MacBook? Do not forget to prepare the device for this. Follow our guide and make sure you don’t forget important things before you start selling a MacBook.

Selling a MacBook: this is how you prepare the device

If you use a MacBook for years, it will be full of personal information, passwords and other data that is private. If you have bought a new MacBook, you want to transfer this data, so that no valuable data is lost. In the five steps you make switching and emptying your old MacBook as smooth as possible. The steps below are identical for the MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and iMac.

1. Backup your Mac
2. Sign out of iCloud and all other services
3. Remove the device from external software
4. Transfer data to a new Mac
5. Restore your old Mac to factory settings

1. Back up your Mac

Always start by backing up your Mac. Especially if you sell the old MacBook before buying a new one, it is important that this process runs smoothly.

That is why it is better to first purchase a new MacBook, transfer the data and only then dispose of your old model. If this does not work, make sure you make a good backup. For this you need an external hard drive with sufficient capacity.

You make a backup of your Mac via Time Machine:

1. Go to Time Machine via Finder → Applications or use the Mac search function to open the program;
2. Choose ‘Configure Time Machine’;
3. If Time Machine is off, turn it on with the slider;
4. Select a hard drive to backup to;
5. The program will now make a backup of your Mac, this may take a while.

Knowing more? Then read our extensive tip about Time Machine

2. Sign out of iCloud and all other services

To ensure that a prospective owner does not have access to your iCloud account and all your data, we recommend that you log out. You do this as follows.

1. Click on the Apple icon in the top left corner;
2. Choose System Preferences;
3. Click on iCloud;
4. Click on ‘Log out’ in the lower left corner of the screen.

In addition to iCloud, you can also log out of iMessage and FaceTime in the app by choosing ‘Preferences’ and ‘Log out’.

3. Remove the device from external software

Logging out of iTunes and other software will make it easier to log back into your new Mac. How this works differs per app, although with iTunes it works as follows:

1. Open iTunes on your MacBook;
2. Click on ‘Account’ in the menu bar;
3. Choose ‘Permissions’ and ‘Revoke permissions for this computer’.

4. Transfer data to a new Mac

Now is the time to safely transfer all your data to your brand new MacBook or iMac. Ideally, you should do this before selling the old Mac. When starting up your new Mac, the option to use the Migration Assistant will appear.

Follow the steps on the screen in this way step by step to transfer your data via an external hard drive (where you saved your backup copy in step 1).

5. Restore your old Mac to factory settings

Have all your data been transferred or do you have a good backup? Then you can finally restore the old Mac completely to factory settings.

1. Restart your Mac via the Apple menu, and hold down the key combination ‘Command + R’;
2. Select ‘Disk Utility’ and then click on your startup disk on the left side of the screen;
3. Go to the ‘Erase’ tab, select ‘APFS’ (or Mac OS Extended (journaled) for older Macs) as the file system and click ‘Erase’;
4. Close the Disk Utility, and choose ‘reinstall macOS’ from the menu that appears;
5. After following the installation process, your Mac will boot as if it were the first time.

Don’t forget to also disconnect your Mac from your account via the Apple ID website. You do this by logging in to the Apple ID website and clicking ‘Remove’ on your old MacBook via ‘Devices’.

Are you stuck? This is everything you need to know about resetting your Mac.