Hi all, I am not extremely well versed in the Apple ecosystem, but recently I was able to acquire a 2018 MacBook Pro from my company’s surplus and wanted to play around with it. However, when I go to do a recovery on it, it forces me to connect to the company’s device management and installs a bunch of junk I don’t want. I spoke to our IT, and they said they won’t remove it from the device management pool until it is out of their warranty period which evidently is still a year or so.
My question is, if I were to be able to install from USB instead of from the internet, would it allow me to bypass the device management, or will it still prompt once I’ve got everything installed and connected?
If I CAN install from USB, how would I go about getting a Ventura install image without another Mac to download from? I currently only have Windows systems otherwise.
Essentially I am trying to see if it is possible to use it without the device management stuff, because if not I am just going to return it to our surplus.
Thanks!
If it’s running macOS Ventura and was previously enrolled into their MDM, every time you install the operating system (OSX Ventura), you will be prompted to connect to the internet which evidently means it will be enrolled into their MDM once again.
You can burn a MacOS Monterey image to a thumb drive, install it on the Mac, and when it asks you to select a network, you skip it, which bypasses the enrollment into the company’s MDM.
Burning MacOS on a thumb drive from Windows: Since Windows doesn’t have native APFS support, I assume you will need to first set up a MacOS virtual machine (others feel free to correct me, I never had done this due to access to a plethora of Macs I have) , passthrough a USB thumb drive to it, burn MacOS Monterey to it from within the virtual machine and then use it on your 2018 MBP.
This will require some trickery, and the solution itself is a bit hacky, but it’s managable.