Apple hardware holds its value better than almost anything else in an office — right up until you dispose of it wrong, at which point it's worth parts. The difference is almost entirely about releasing it properly, and it takes minutes per device if you do it before they leave.
Local files, Photos libraries on design machines, anything not synced. Once erased on Apple silicon it is genuinely unrecoverable, which is the point of the hardware encryption.
Apple Account, iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime. Signing out of iCloud is what turns off Find My and therefore Activation Lock for that user.
Use Erase All Content and Settings on Apple silicon Macs, iPads and iPhones. It destroys the encryption keys, which makes the contents unrecoverable without touching every flash cell — the soldered-storage equivalent of a verified wipe.
Unenroll the device so it stops being managed and stops reapplying your configuration profiles.
This is the step people miss. A device still assigned to your organisation in ABM will re-enroll into your MDM on setup, which makes it useless to a buyer even if everything else was done.
Power it on and check it reaches the normal setup assistant without asking for a previous owner's Apple Account and without pulling down a management profile. If it does either, something is still bound.
Apple equipment has the deepest and most liquid secondary market of anything in a typical office. A business Mac four or five years old still commands a real price, where an equivalent Windows laptop would be worth much less.
Activation Lock removes essentially all of it. A locked device cannot be set up by a new owner at all, so it stops being a computer and becomes a parts donor — screen, battery, case, logic board if it can be used. On a batch of MacBooks that is the difference between a serious cheque and a token one.
It is also, unlike most value problems, completely within your control and free to fix. The constraint is that it has to happen while you still hold the devices and the administrative access. Once machines have been collected, or an administrator has left and nobody knows the ABM credentials, it becomes slow and sometimes impossible.
Activation Lock prevents anyone other than the original owner from setting the device up, so a locked device cannot be used as a computer at all. That drops it from resale value to parts value, which on Apple hardware is a large gap because the resale market is otherwise strong. Releasing devices properly before disposal is free, takes minutes per device, and is usually the single most valuable step in an Apple disposal project.
Sign out of iCloud and the Apple Account on the device, then erase it using Erase All Content and Settings. Separately, unenroll it from your MDM and release it from Apple Business Manager, since a device still assigned to your organisation will re-enroll on setup even after a clean erase. Confirm by powering it on and checking it reaches the normal setup assistant without asking for a previous Apple Account or downloading a management profile.
On Apple silicon Macs and recent Intel models, no. The storage is soldered to the logic board and is not removable. The sanitisation method is Erase All Content and Settings, which destroys the encryption keys and renders the stored data unrecoverable. If the data was highly sensitive and policy requires physical destruction, the logic board itself has to be destroyed, which removes most of the device's value.
It is Apple's portal for organisations to own and assign devices, and devices enrolled there are automatically supervised and enrolled into the organisation's MDM during setup. For disposal it matters because a device still assigned to your organisation in Apple Business Manager will re-enroll into your management even after a complete erase, making it unusable to a buyer. Releasing the device from ABM is a separate step from erasing it and from unenrolling it from MDM.
Yes, and they are among the better things to sell rather than recycle because of how well Apple hardware holds value. The two factors that matter most are whether the devices have been properly released from Activation Lock, MDM and Apple Business Manager, and their physical condition, particularly screens and casework. Release them first, then send a list of models and quantities.
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