Would you buy a refurbished?

[Ambrosia7177]

@mrkramer

What are you going to do with the 2015 in 3 years or whenever you get rid of it? It won't have any value then, especially without a hard drive.

In the past, I'd spend $50-$100 and install a new HDD, and then donate it to a school or the Salvation Army/Goodwill/etc.

You and I might find a 2015 MBP in 2010 to be "worthless", but there are millions of Americans who would give their right arm for such a computer. Imagine some student, or a single mom looking for a better life, or a disabled vet, or a homeless person looking to start over.

I'd rather try and help those people than adding to a landfill...
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If File Vault is turned on, and you erase the drive, then the erased data is still encrypted, making it un-recoverable.
I'm pretty sure you can do that erasure of an encrypted volume when booted from internet recovery.

Didn't I read somewhere that erasing a File Vault encrypted SSD complies with data protection with US gov, at least to a confidential info level?

@DeltaMac,

Maybe this is the way to do it, but based on my limited experience, what you are saying doesn't work. So please help me understand if it can work...

As I type, ironically, I'm still on my 2012 MBP. (My "new" 2015 MBP with removable SSD is collecting dust!)

I run FileVault 2 on this 2012, and I use CCC regularly to clone my MBP for backup.

Last year, I had an external HDD that was a clone of this 2012 MBP and it had FV2 on it.

One day I went to format this external HDD which was a clone with FV2 on it, because I wanted to use the HDD for something else. (I don't recall what.)

When I went into Disk Utilities and tried to reformat that external encrypted clone, Disk Utilities would NOT let me do that.

Based on this experience, other people's advice to simply use FV2 to encrypt your new MBP with soldered SSD doesn't solve my problem when I give the computer away. Yes, FV2 protects my data while I own the new MBP with soldered in SSD, but when I gve it away, it appears that the recipient would have a new laptop that was encrypted and unusable without me unlocking it and thus exposing my data, which based on my research, can NEVER be truly erased from a SSD.

See my dilemma??

IF I could use FV2 on a new MBP with soldered SSD, and IF when I went to donate it, I could simply reinstall Sierra or whatever on top of this encrypted container, THEN I suppose that would address my concerns, because as you said, the encrypted container remains encrypted even if it is erased or overwritten.

But when I tried that in the past it didn't work.

Now, truth be told, my 2012 MBP runs Mountain Lion, so maybe that matters?

Does all of this make sense?

And if you can help me understand how to make your suggestion work, then maybe we have a winning answer!

(Of course, I'd feel 10,000 times better if I could just take the ***** SSD out of my computer like you'd expect!!!)

 

[DeltaMac]

Hmm....
Getting ready to sell your older Mac, which has a "soldered/built-in" storage drive/SSD?
Encrypt that drive (with your important data) with file vault. (external backup that you mentioned should also work this way)
Boot to internet recovery (not to your boot drive, or even your recovery partition)
Erase the drive (not just the volume)
The encrypted volume is now erased, and data is now "hopelessly" scrambled, due to the encryption.

I assume that when you say "Disk Utilities would NOT let me do that", you mean that the volume was "greyed-out", and not clickable, so not available to erase. The volume may simply be a core storage volume, which you can revert through a simple terminal command.
I bet this article will get your boot drive in an "erasable" condition by reverting your core storage volume, which if that is the situation now, will then allow the full erasure of your encrypted drive.