How to sell a macbook air

[Serban]

How is the best way to give away your macbook air or maybe any macbook to somebody with assurance that person not gain any private data?

Shall i make a reinstall of my macOS? I mean a restart enter with "alt" in disk utilities then erase the HDD and after that reinstall ML?

 

[TC25]

How is the best way to give away your macbook air or maybe any macbook to somebody with assurance that person not gain any private data?

The same way people have sold PCs for decades.

Reformat the HD and reinstall the operating system.

 

[jdechko]

What Macbook Air model do you have? Does it have a traditional hard drive or is it one with a solid state or flash drive. (The 2010 through current model Airs all have flash memory).

If it has flash memory or a SSD and you are running Lion or Mountain Lion, then the best method is to enable FileVault2. This will encrypt the drive first. After it's finished encrypting, feel free to format the drive and reinstall Mac OS X as normal (without encryption).

By encrypting the drive first and then formatting, you are locking the door (encryption) and throwing away the key (reformatting) then bulldozing the building and building a completely new structure on top of it.

In short, pretty much nobody except 3-letter government agencies will be able to recover your data, and they're probably not too concerned with what you've been doing anyway.

 

[GGJstudios]

If you're on Snow Leopard or earlier:

Mac 101: Preparing your old Mac for sale or recycling​

If you're on Lion or later:

The Safe Mac » How to prepare your Mac for sale
OS X: About OS X Recovery
Apple - OS X Mountain Lion Recovery
How To Do A Clean Install Of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 On Your Mac​

 

[Serban]

I have the late 2012 macbook 13" with 128 ssd
what is FileVault2? On Erase tab is the second line?

 

[jdechko]

Ok. Follow the directions I listed above.

I also made a complete guide here.

FileVault2 is the whole disk encryption security software included with 10.7 and later. It means that without your user password to unlock the drive, your data is secure.

When you erase your disk from the Disk Utility, it gives you the option to provide a new name for the disk (like Macintosh HD). You can leave this blank when you format, because I think the install process will automatically rename it to Macintosh HD.