I have two MacBooks that I acquired through two different startups. Both companies no longer exist and I was basically given the laptops. (They have just been sitting in my closet for a few years collecting dust, and it seems like a waste.)
Unfortunately, now that I want to use the laptops as part of a local k8s cluster (or even dedicated music production hardware), I am locked out of wiping the things because they want to connect to MDM servers that no longer exist or have admin passwords that have long since been forgotten.
Since these laptops are essentially “bricked” I have no problems opening them up and attempting hardware hacks to get around this stuff.
Both laptops are in various states of reset or wipe due to previous attempts to reset. (Funny thing, actually. I was personally responsible for locking down one of these laptops at the time they were in corporate use…)
Trash or treasure? I dunno. I am apple-dumb.
If they’re properly locked down the option to boot another from another device or even the recovery drive will be locked behind a password. It’s like it’s been bios locked on a PC but rather than being stored with a battery it’s saved into the physical chip which would need to be removed and either replaced or reflashed.