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A couple years ago I purchased an older MacBook from Craigslist to do some iOS development. The previous owner had upgraded the machine to OS X, but didn't give me any discs with the computer.

I no longer have any use for this machine and am ready to sell it to someone else. I've removed all of the development apps I've installed, and verified that the computer isn't authorized for my iTunes account.

I've found methods online to restore a MacBook to "factory defaults", but it's my understanding that this would also remove the OS upgrade (please correct me if there's a way to do this without downgrading the OS).

Short of a full restore, what's the best way to remove my user account and/or otherwise prepare the MacBook for sale? I'm not too worried about personal information being left behind. I didn't use this machine for personal use so there's not much that should be recoverable.

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Reset to default
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There might be better ways to do this, but seeing that I agree with you that restoring to factory defaults will cause problems/extra work with OS upgrades, I would recommend the following way:

  1. Move any personal data on machine to your archive or new machine
  2. clear user account of personal date (just to be safe and to understand whats on there)
  3. Make sure there are no personal data outside of your user account. If there is clean up
  4. Make a new admin account
  5. Delete you old admin and other accounts on machine. Gives option to delete account data as well

Note this way will clear machine but is probably the best way if you have highly sensitive data on machine. if there is spend some more time on step 2. or consider doing the total reinstall

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  • just noticed your reputation. I would guess that you probably have installs of of versions of OSX available on flash. Do a fresh install from those. I have done that before and it saves a lot of time compared to starting with the disks that came with the machine and progressively loading upgrades.
    – Joop
    Commented Jun 13, 2013 at 6:09
  • Step 2 (clear user account) is not necessary, if you delete all the data in step 5. Also, you can "securely" delete the user directory contents when deleting the account. It will write 0s to the occupied blocks. If you've deleted the sensitive data already, then securely deleting the account in this way is counterproductive, as only the current data (and, not the previously deleted sensitive data) would be securely deleted via the writing of 0s.
    – Kent
    Commented Jun 13, 2013 at 6:30
  • Another comment -- if you have any licensed software or software from the Mac App Store, the above procedure is not sufficient. You need to delete the app, and perhaps other auxiliary files in /Library/ that the app had created.
    – Kent
    Commented Jun 13, 2013 at 6:33

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