Apple Mac Mini (M1): One More Thing | Hacker News Reader

Apple Mac Mini (M1): One More Thing

thurrott.com

15 pointswarp13 comments

I wouldn’t call the machine “bricked” if you could just restart the process. “Bricked” is when you cannot recover from a problem in any way. The machine is the as useless as a brick. Having to restart the restore process with a potential successful outcome is annoying, but far from “bricked”.

> Now there are two partitions on the drive, Macintosh HD, as before, and Data, and it’s not clear if you need to wipe out just one or both.

Isn't this a feature of Catalina, not M1 Macs? At any rate, the author is acting purposely obtuse (not unusual for Thurrott). The process takes a few steps, sure, but it's not like you can't just google "prepare mac for resale" and it lands you here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201065

There's a menu option to show physical drives instead of their strange partition scheme. You can the format the entire drive.

Boot from the recovery partition, format the main partition and reinstall the OS. It's not difficult.

Even if you manage to completely hose your SSD configuration to the point where the system can't boot from the recovery partition, you can use the free Apple Configurator 2 to do a factory reset. (which would also wipe all data)

https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-configurator-2/revive-...

Author states they did that, but that it wouldn't allow them to create a new user account after installation. Theres probably some PEBCAK going on there - doesnt seem like they have much experience with macs.

As for restoring via configurator - you need a second mac for that.

Given that the author owns more than one Mac, there is really no excuse except for some very obvious ignorance of how you get basic admin tasks done on the other side of the fence.

As a bonus, a complete factory reset using Configurator is faster than the Windows 10 "reset this PC" process that he holds up as some sort of gold standard that Macs don't meet.

For future reference, 'xartutil --erase-all' in Terminal in macOS Recovery erases all data in the Secure Enclave, including the keys used for disk encryption. In that way, it can be considered equivalent to a secure erase command on a non-Apple SSD, except Apple can be trusted to have implemented it properly unlike normal SSD vendors who have been caught implementing it as a NOP.

Also, in my experience, Apple does not require returns to have a working OS installation. You can erase and return in that state.

Many people have asked me for advice about a new computer and I tell them "The M1 Macs are better than anything else in terms of hardware, if you can stand using MacOS."

Funny, as i can’t stand anything else but MacOs

This has been my experience too. I like the hardware, but MacOS is something I just tolerate. Lot of minor irritants, lack of ability/keyboard shortcuts to dock Windows, different short cut for switching window and application to name a few.

What would you use instead? Windows? Desktop Linux? stifled but not really snicker

I agree that the flow is not optimal, but for most users it will by definition only happen once in the lifetime of the device. Even if the can’t find the instructions from Google, they can still bring to Apple store for help. If you had to reset Apple devices to default as often as you have with Windows I’m sure they would make it more user friendly.

Seems like the author is grasping at straws.

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