Use Disk Utility there to erase your drive and then reinstall the operating system. But you can go to this page at Apple's site and it will walk you through how to reboot into Recovery Mode. I'm not going to go into the details here because that's not what this video is about. If you have an older Mac it's a little more complex. It's all right there! This is new in macOS Monterey.

You just go to System Preferences, Erase All Content and Settings.

With newer Macs you can go to System Preferences and then once you're in System Preferences you won't find an option for It here. Now the way you do this depends on the age of your Mac. Now in all those situations you want to erase the Mac's hard drive and reinstall the operating system from scratch basically resetting it to factory settings. The third situation is if you have a modern Mac either with the M1 processor or an Intel processor including the T2 chip. The second situation is if you have an older Intel Mac with a solid state drive but it's before Apple starting putting the T2 security chip inside the Macs. The first situation is if you have a much older Mac that has a spinning hard disk drive. Now exactly what you do depends on your Mac. So conventional wisdom says that before you donate, sell, or recycle a Mac you should do things to clean your data off of the internal drive so somebody can't get ahold of it and steal your information. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Let's take a look at what you should do to protect your data before you get rid of a Mac. Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with. Check out Do You Need To Secure Wipe a Mac Drive? at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Secure wipe