There is a weird thing with Apple computers. They retain the possibility to be formatted back to their construction settings. Which means MacOS is more like a firmware to me than an OS. It did come handy when a recent unfortunate event hit my family.
I bought back my first Apple Macbook Pro from my employer, when it reached its end-of-life for the company. It’s an Intel chip computer from 2017 with a 16-inch screen. It has a dent in one corner of the aluminum case because I dropped it on the floor while I was a young recruit, not even 3 months after I joined. I’m emotionally attached to this machine. I had never owned an Apple computer before. Had to learn everything about Mac at the same time I had to learn about my new job.
3 years later, the company decided I should use a new laptop and so I bought that one for very little money. The company was extremely generous at the time and had a buy-back program for the laptop they were replacing. I bought it because it was a decent machine and my wife needed a “new” Macbook. Hers was even older and definitely had reached Apple’s end-of-life. Her system wasn’t updating anymore. It would not support any installation of a new program. It hadn’t received MacOS security updates in years. The “new” one felt like a fresh start for her.
A few years later, she got herself a brand new Macbook Pro, built to her own spec. And thus my first Macbook returned to my hands. After keeping it unused on a shelf for a while, I decided to wipe out the proprietary OS and put a fresh Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on it, as I’m more comfortable with those systems than with proprietary ones.
Felt good to give a fresh code of paint to a 6 years old computer. I’ve been using it as a personal machine since. Not spending hours on it, as I already spend hours on a computer at work. But it came as a handy private computer I could use. And most importantly, it was running a familiar Linux system.
Then last week, my wife broke the screen of her beefy Macbook. A small piece of debris had fell on her keyboard as she was working outside. She did not see it when she closed the lid. When she reopened the laptop, large parts of the screen had turned completely black, forever. The fragment of concrete had been compressed between the keyboard and the screen and destroyed that part of the display. After consulting with an official Apple repair shop, she’ll need to leave the machine with them for 5 days in order to repair it. 5 days without a laptop is too much for a freelancer. She asked to have the old Macbook back. 0_o
Well, is that even possible? I did wipe the disk completely when I installed Ubuntu 3 years ago. A quick search online tells me it’s possible. All I need to do is boot in recovery mode and reformat the computer with either the MacOS version the laptop was builtin with or with the latest version that works on it (so choosing between El Capitan or Monterey).
Internet didn’t lie. After backing up my personal data and pressing Command+Shift+R at reboot, the system offered me to connect to the Wifi and download a recovery system. Once in recovery, I could format the disk properly and install Monterey. And that felt as easy as it felt weird.
I’m from the school where you need to get an OS on a physical disk (diskette or CD-ROMs before, USB recently) and then boot from that external device in order to install the operating system you want. That’s usually how you install Windows or Linux on any machine. That’s less true for smartphones and other internet connected devices that we have scattered around the house. For those we don’t even think we can change the OS or firmware. All we think we can do is reset them to their factory settings.
A long post to say that any Apple machine is built with a chip that, when fired at a specific time, can call “home” and reinstall an original proprietary operating system on the adjacent disk. It’s incredibly convenient and scary at the same time. Convenient because I just had to press a few keys and reactivate a familiar machine for my wife. Scary because I don’t know what that chip does. And I can never really feel I’m in full control of the system. It’s like having a Trojan horse built in. Wiping a brand new operating system like Ubuntu on a Mac will not get rid of the information on that chip. I just hope that chip doesn’t do stuff on its own when I have Ubuntu installed.
With the latest Apple silicon computers (M chips instead of Intel), it’s even a whole partition of the disk that you need to keep in order have the ability to reinstall MacOS on the machines. But that’s another story.
Anyway, in a week, I’ll probably be flashing an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS on that old machine again. Let’s see if the camera will work out of the box this time.
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