password for genius bar?

[mentaluproar]

I'm bringing in my retina macbook pro AGAIN for weird creaking, this time at the hinge in the back. It sounds like adhesive is letting go of it, and the genius said it looks slightly bowed. He ordered a replacement screen and told me to give the password for my main user account.

My question is why. Why would they need that? While I'm not exactly keeping nuclear launch codes on my macbook, and I do have undercover installed and ready, but it's not difficult to defeat those measures.

OSX boots just fine externally, as I would imagine Apple's tools would too. So why do they need that password?

I could always erase the entire system and restore from NAS when I get back, but is there a reason to leave it as-is?

 

[Anitramane]

They need it to check if everything Works.

 

[RMXO]

I always change my password to something simple like "hello" when handing in my laptop and change it back when I get it back.

 

[mentaluproar]

changing it doesn't do me much good with my keychain exposed.

 

[Gav2k]

changing it doesn't do me much good with my keychain exposed.

Sign out of iCloud! Problem solved.

 

[Jaben3421]

Sign out of iCloud! Problem solved.

The app Keychain Access still holds all his login passwords as well as system passwords locally, and all they need to access it is his admin account password.

 

[maflynn]

On the rare occasions that I had to send my laptop into apple, I created a guest account for them to use and removed my personal information, i.e., removed my user account and then when I got it back, restored it from a backup

 

[heisenberg123]

to be honest its 100% recomended you do a full backup before sending it in for service, use something like CarbonCopyCloner make a full bootable backup

do a clean install on your machine and hand it over with no password

 

[mentaluproar]

I'll just call in and ask why they need it as is.

 

[hfg]

Can't you create a separate "Repair" admin account and just let them use that for their repair diagnostics?

It might be a good plan to create that while the computer is fully operational, since sometimes you can't fully manage the computer or even backup or delete data due to the fault condition when you need to take it in for repair.