Hi everyone Aaron here for Zollotech and i wanted to show you the easiest way to reset your mac
back to factory default if it's an m1 or apple silicon-based mac running mac os monterey or newer
and so the first thing is you will need an m1 or apple silicon-based mac meaning one of the
latest macbook airs macbook pros or imac or mac mini running apple's own chipsets if you
have that and mac os monterey you can check for mac os monterey by clicking the apple
and then going to about this mac you'll see mac os monterey here if you have that or a newer version
by the time you're watching this video this method will work for you and when it's reset
everything will be erased your apple id will be removed from the device
and it will be returned to just like it was when you took it out of the box for the first time
and so before we get started just make sure you have a backup as this will erase everything off
the device and you won't be able to recover it unless you have a backup on an external drive or
in the cloud somewhere so let's go ahead and close this and let me show you how to do this it's
very simple and you will need your apple id and typically you'll want a network connection as well
so we want to go to system preferences click on system preferences and if you don't have
it here you can either search for it with the little search icon in the upper right
or you can go to finder click on applications scroll down and you'll see system preferences
once you're in system preferences go ahead and click at the top where it says system preferences
then click erase all content and settings and so here it's going to ask for your password go
ahead and put in the password the same one you would log into the computer with once you've
entered your password you'll see it says erase all content and settings all settings media and data
will be erased the following items will also be removed it's going to remove your apple id
touch id any fingerprints that were stored on the computer any paired accessories as well as
find my and activation locks so as long as you want to remove that go ahead and click continue
here it's going to ask us to sign out of our apple id in order to do that we're going to
have to be connected to a network like i said before and you'll also need the password for
your apple id typically it's going to be similar to the one you use for your app store as well
so go ahead and put in that password now the next screen you may or may not have depending
on if you use icloud or not it says the following applications are still syncing to icloud
if you don't want to wait until the sync completes you may lose data and that's fine i don't need
this one to sync so we'll go ahead and click continue next it's going to warn you that you
are about to erase all content and settings from this mac so go ahead and click erase all content
in settings if you have a backup or you want to do that now the computer will turn off and then
it will reboot and it will take a moment to erase everything and then boot up so you'll
have a little status bar just wait for that to complete and then we'll move on to the next step
now that took about three minutes or so and now we can click on the language we want and then
click continue now on the activate mac screen you can do one of two things if you're going to keep
this for yourself maybe you were just erasing it and wanting to start over or you're giving
it to a family member you can connect it to a network by clicking on the icon in the upper right
selecting your network and logging in and then activating however if you want to return this
or you're selling it to someone else just go to the apple and click shut down and you're done
everything's securely erased however if you want to activate this to get to the setup screen
so you can proceed go ahead and click the icon in the upper right with the little network icon
now you'll see it's connected to my network and it automatically starts to activate the mac
so it will need that network connection to activate so give it just a moment to activate
and then we'll go to the next step you'll see it says your mac is activated it will restart in 55
seconds from now usually about a minute so we'll click on restart and when it comes back up we'll
be back at the main setup screen so you can see everything booted up we're now at the setup screen
where it's writing out the word hello over and over in different languages and you can continue
to set this up you can close it give it away put it in the box return it whatever you'd like to do
at this point all of your data has been securely removed and your apple id is no longer associated
with it so you're good to go at this point hopefully this helped you out and if you have any
additional questions i'd love to help you out just let me know in the comments below and i'll try
and answer when i can if you haven't subscribed already though please subscribe and if you enjoyed
the video please give it a like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron i'll see you next time