How to sell your mac

Or more specifically, “how to prepare your mac to be sold.”

I recently sold my 15″ Macbook Pro that had served me well from the very tail end of Philly and into New York (roughly a year and a half). Part of me wanted to flip it and instantly buy the new Macbook Pro, but that would have cost me at least another thousand dollars. Instead I realized that it was rapidly depreciating in value, and I have a perfectly good macbook that (however beleaguered) gets me through the day. And I take it home most nights anyway. I could also wax on about the aluminum macbook vs. the pro, but that is a topic for another conversation. This is about getting rid of yours.

Obviously, you need to back up your data. Since I run Leopard, I had Time Machine dating back to a couple months, and I also had the contents of my home directory backed up on Amazon S3.

Do what you need to do. Go buy a hard drive. It’s faster in the short run and for this purpose, but I can’t preach the benefit enough of making your files accessible in the cloud. Make sure that you backup your music and media files because, while it is possible to pull it back off the iDevice, it isn’t fun.

I recently noticed that you can get 1TB drives (that’s ter-a-byte) for less than $150. Amazon’s got the Iomega for $130 and you could probably find them even cheaper at newgg.com. That’s a buttload of hard drive.

If you have Leopard, get a complete Time Machine save. If you have Tiger or before, get Super Duper!. It’s a great, free program that has saved my hide more than once. Make a complete mirror of your drive.

Got it? Good.

Now, while deleting your user profile from the computer probably takes care of a lot of this, I’m a little paranoid. Go to iTunes and de-authorize the computer. Apple tells you to do this anytime you send the computer in for repair, or sell it. You are only allowed 5 authorized machines per account, and while you can disable this later, you might lose some media. Next, open Keychain Access (Inside Applications and System Preferences). Delete all the saved passwords, credit card references, etc. These passwords can be revealed in plain text if you know the Administrator account password.

Because your Applications live outside the user’s home directory, when you delete your account, these stay. Remove your account information from or delete any application that has it. I found last.fm, my full skitch account, and confidential files in dropbox.

Now that you’ve moved every personal file and all your personal information (because you backed it, riiight?) to the trash, it’s time to say “sayonara.” While in Finder, select “Secure Delete” from the File menu. This will empty the trash, and then repeatedly writes over the parts of your hard drive to prevent them from being searched “forensically.” Think of it as a shredder for deleted files. This will take longer than a normal trashing emptying, but once it’s down you can feel very confident that no one will be reading your stuff.

In system preferences under the sharing tab, as a nice touch, change the machine’s name and other stuff to the buyer’s name. If you don’t know their name, make it something generic like my-macbook-pro.

Final step. Go to the system preferences > accounts and create a new user name/password for your sale. Make it something you will remember, and recommend they change it after purchase. Also make sure that they have administrative status, otherwise the sky will fall.

Log out of your user account, and log in as the new owner. Then navigate your way back over to “accounts” and delete your old user. This is the point of no return. If you choose to delete the whole home directory, the computer will belong to the buyer’s account alone.

This is the point at which I took the machine downstairs, and carefully transferred Charlie in the carrying arms of Robert James. Did I go too far? Did I not go far enough?