I saw a similar Windows post from three years ago in here so I thought you all can help me. I recently left my job and they said to just throw away the MacBook I was using. I asked if I can use it and IT said sure. A couple of days after starting a new job, I went back to the MacBook to clean it up and use it, and it was locked. On the Lock Screen, it says, ‘This Mac is Locked. The system PIN is required to use this Mac.’ It goes on to say that it has been frozen and to contact the manager or enter the PIN, which I no longer have because it changes. Is there any way to get around this or just delete it from reboot? I’ve tried Command+R and Control+Option+Shift after shutdown and startup, but they both come back to this screen. I don’t want anything that was on the Mac; I just want to be able to use a fresh one. Any help would be appreciated. FINAL UPDATE: I took it back to the company this morning and told them what the IT guy said and they laughed. They said there is no way to get around it and I shouldn’t have been told I could keep it. Well, that was a fun waste of time and energy. Thanks again for all the comments!
Nope, they have locked it as it’s a company machine.
Thanks for the reply. I was kind of guessing that is the case. Makes sense why they were laughing when I asked if I can still use it.
As another commenter suggested - talk to your old manager. This is not the way; neither spreading misinformation to employees nor abandoning office equipment wastefully like that. If the manager’s any good, they’ll breathe down IT’s necks until they either unlock it or ask it back to reconfigure.
No, it’s a paperweight now.
Thanks for the reply. Makes me wonder why they didn’t want it back.
Probably cheaper to get rid of it than having it back and needing to reconfigure it.
Or paying to recycle it.
People don’t understand that today we (IT departments) have to pay to recycle old tech. We used to have people calling us asking for our old tech, now everyone is a reseller, and you have to pay them to take the old stuff.
There are some services that were free, just gotta look for them. I used one when I was in charge of getting that stuff out.
Yeah, but those kinds are far in between. Heck, got to be honest, the only way to get rid of our old PCs was to give them away to anyone who was interested (excluding the hard drives; those things get scrapped).
I don’t know about that. I am in K12 and I am fielding calls, emails, even actual postal mail from these people. Even offering to pay for iPads. So I have never paid to have someone come haul a year’s worth of junk out of my basement over the summer. But even if you do not have that, at least in my state, all towns have to have a recycle center, and none I know of charge for e-waste.
It is also the case many departments are either instructed to or create instructions that the cool freebie old tech giveaway to employees are prohibited.
Weird. I work for a reselling company and we’re always paying for laptops and MFF machines, many of which are ex-enterprise. We’d love it if all these firms who are used to paying to recycle switched to us because we pay them. Granted, we mark down to pennies on the dollar if they’re still MDM or have BIOS protections. Occasionally we still get machines that are linked via TenantLockdown, but I’ve found a way to remove the UEFI hashes.
School here and I have a TON of broken devices. I am not joking when I say I have at least 400 broken devices in storage right now. Nobody is taking broken stuff or old LCD monitors for free.
Goodwill takes them. At least the one in Oregon does.
There are limits to what a lot of these places take. Dumping 400+ broken machines often would be a huge toll.
They actually took a U-Haul full of laptops and computer components. More than a few hundred laptops and didn’t even flinch.
For some reason, broken devices weren’t in my calculus this morning; I blame lack of coffee. That being said, we bought about 60 iMacs around eight months ago, ranging from 2015-2020. However, all but one had cracked glass displays - from a school, I think, as well. Management wasn’t in a hurry for me to run full tests on them aside from checking MDM, and to my great pleasure, the IT had reinstalled macOS on all of them. So it was a simple (does it have MDM?) test. I’ll get around to them on slower days.
I would.