Pitfalls of resetting a MBA 2011 for gifting

[Bodhitree]

So I was going to give my MBA 2011 away to a friend, and I followed the recommended procedure from the articles: deauthorising Music and TV, logging out of iCloud, booting into recovery, erasing the drive… and then i rebooted. Silly me.

The machine had macOS High Sierra on it, but on rebooting into recovery again I discovered it was giving me MacOS X Lion, which had originally shipped with the machine. So I installed Lion, thinking I would help my friend set up an account and then upgrade the machine to High Sierra the usual way.

However, once my friend logged into her iCloud account, we discovered the Safari web browser was too old to access https sites, and Firefox no longer supports Lion. First hurdle. On another Mac we discovered that we should install El Capitan first, then High Sierra. We managed to get the URL for downloading El Capitan onto the laptop. Then we discovered that since El Capitan was not in her purchase history it wouldn’t let her download it. Next hurdle.

In the end, I ended up recommending to her that she take it to an Apple Store (there is one nearby) and ask them to help. It would have rather ruined the afternoon to spend time fiddling with downloads and terminal commands to make bootable installers…

It shouldn’t be this difficult, really. Grumble grumble.

 

[BanditoB]

I recently went through a similar process with a 2011 MacBook Pro. I tried Lion and El Capitan, but when the installer would run it would encounter a fatal error. What eventually worked for me was to make a bootable USB drive with OS X High Sierra on it. I was able to install High Sierra directly without having to update starting from OS X Lion.

I tried setting things up on an M1-based MacBook, but that was a non-starter. I ended up going back to one of my old iMacs that was actually running High Sierra and was able to download the install package there and get it to create the installable USB drive according to Apple's support document for setting up older versions of OS X. If I hadn't had an older Mac of a similar vintage, I don't think I would have been able to get this to work.

 

[Mrbobb]

It shouldn’t be this difficult, really. Grumble grumble.

1000%.

Stooopid Apple just wants us to throw away old, but perfect good stuff so they can sell us new stuff, liers that they care about the planet.

That's one thing that I hate about Apple, my 1996 Windows Photoshop still works on Win10, no prob, I don't need to pay for upgrades I don't need, money grows on trees? Doesn't Apple have enough $$$?

Thanks for the head-up, I guess I won't donate my old Air after all, it maybe more trouble than is worth for the donee.

 

[Bodhitree]

I recently went through a similar process with a 2011 MacBook Pro. I tried Lion and El Capitan, but when the installer would run it would encounter a fatal error. What eventually worked for me was to make a bootable USB drive with OS X High Sierra on it. I was able to install High Sierra directly without having to update starting from OS X Lion.

I tried setting things up on an M1-based MacBook, but that was a non-starter. I ended up going back to one of my old iMacs that was actually running High Sierra and was able to download the install package there and get it to create the installable USB drive according to Apple's support document for setting up older versions of OS X. If I hadn't had an older Mac of a similar vintage, I don't think I would have been able to get this to work.

Yeah my friend who I gifted the laptop to had a recent Intel 27” iMac with macOS Monterey on it, it was not that useful in downloading old versions because she had never gone through the whole update process on it.

I may have a go creating a bootable installer for her on my mom’s 2011 21.5” iMac, which is locked to High Sierra as the highest OS it can support. Thanks for the tip!

If I had just stayed in the High Sierra recovery application after I erased the drive, and reinstalled High Sierra from there, it would probably have been ok and I would have ended up with the laptop with a clean install of High Sierra on it, which would have been my ideal outcome. Rebooting was my mistake.

But the whole process is just FUBAR’ed, why would you ever want to downgrade a perfectly good laptop running High Sierra to a nearly useless piece of junk running Lion? Why would you make a setup process where doing so was easy to do by accident? It’s not solidly thought through, i’m afraid.