Selling macbook pro and installing bootcamb, step by step please

Hi Ramy,

If you want to do this, you will have to follow these instructions exactly. Also, you may or may not need sighted assistance for some of this. The parts I used to have trouble on my old Intel MacBook Pro, was selecting my Wi-Fi after resetting the drive, And getting VoiceOver to actually turn on, on the recovery screen. It does work, but my experience was that the volume was extremely low, plugging in a headset/earbud did help, a little bit.

The steps:
First we are going to wipe the hard drive.

1. Power on, or reboot if it's already on, and immediately press command plus option plus R. Hold these keys down for several seconds.
2. As I recall, there is no Audible alert to let you know this worked, so maybe hold the keys for 15 to 20 seconds, and then let go. Wait another 10 seconds or so, and then start spamming command plus F5 until you actually hear voiceover activate. Note, it will be using the Fred voice.
3. If the first two steps above worked, you should be on the recovery screen. There are three or four options here. The first option you want is disk utility.
4. Basic voiceover navigation works here, so just arrow up or down until you highlight disk utility, press VO plus space, or enter.
5. On the disk utility screen, you want to highlight the disk that actually holds your current build of macOS. Note there may be anything from 2 to 6 options on the disk utility screen. You want the one labeled "MacIntosh HD", assuming when you installed macOS before, you left the hard drive with its default label.
6. Now pay attention, and be patient here. You want to choose the erase disc option. First highlight Macintosh HD. Next, navigate over to the erased disk option. There may be a bunch of choices here. The important options are format, you're going to want AFS. It's up to you what level of erasing you want, most people just go with the quickest option. Next, choose name, best to just go with "Macintosh HD". Navigate over to erase or it may be labeled delete, and activate that button. If you navigate back, there will be a checkbox or a collapsible button to show details in a contractable window. This is optional, but you can go in and see what the computer is doing as it Eracist files etc. when it is done, the done button at the end will be highlighted. Activate it, and then you should be done with disutility. If everything went as planned, you should have a brand new squeaky clean Macintosh HD Drive showing in your list of drives under disutility. From here, you can press command Q, or activate the menu above with VO plus M, then choose the first option, and navigate to the bottom and close disc utility.
7. When you close disk utility, you, should, be back on the recovery screen. Now you want to choose the option to reinstall macOS. Navigate to that option, I believe it's the last option, and press VO plus space, or enter. You won't see this, but a globe will eventually appear on your screen with a progress bar. This will take some time, because it's basically downloading the latest available macOS software for your computer, and will install it once it's downloaded.
8. Here is where you, May, need sighted assistance. When the globe pops up and that progress bar appears, it will eventually ask you to choose a network to connect to. Unfortunately, I have never been able to get VO to work on this particular screen. However, if you can do that, or if you have a sighted assistant to help you click your network, then you will be golden. Once you are past the network stage, you just have to sit back and wait for your MacBook to do its thing. You won't need to touch the computer again, until it boots up a fresh macOS for the first time.

This portion will now be done. You have no need to log into your MacBook, go through the set up process, add your Apple ID, none of that. Since you're selling your Mac, it is now wiped all of your personal data, and is now ready to be sold.

However...

You said your friend wants you to set up windows on it for her to use. I am not sure if you can install windows on Boot Camp without adding your Apple credentials, but I'm gonna write out the instructions, assuming that you can. If not, your friend will just have to add her own credentials, and then you can follow the below instructions. Best of luck, whichever way you go about it.

Ignore adding your Apple ID, or even adding a pin to your macOS desktop. Once you've gotten the computer booted to the desktop, open up utilities, I believe this is command plus shift plus you if memory serves. Activate Boot Camp, and follow the instructions.
Things to consider, you need a valid copy of Windows OS, and you need a valid product key. Unlike macOS, Windows is not free. Also, I would recommend you see if your Mac is capable of running Windows 11, because Microsoft no longer supports Windows 10.
Otherwise, if you have all of that, just follow the Boot Camp on screen instructions. They are quite self-explanatory.

HTH.

Edited for silly typos

1. You don't need to specify a network if you have an ethernet cable. You should get one, they're handy. If your WiFi goes, either on the computer or router/modem end, it's really useful to be able to plug in directly.

2. I honestly don't remember how I did this, but I didn't use Bootcamp on my old intel Mac, an iMac from Ca. 2011. I wiped the drive and installed Windows directly, then added the Bootcamp drivers from Apple. It worked a treat.

I forget if you can format as NTFS directly when you erase the drive. Also, you need to go into the toolbar of Disk Utility and pick an option there, unfortunately I forget what it is. Maybe you have to pick the partition your Mac's drive is on, or there might be a "show all" or something, and then you pick the partition from the table. When I ran DU and just tried to erase Mac HD, it never worked until I did this. I didn't do it that often and had to fight with it until I remembered you had to do this every single time.

Anyway, you shouldn't need to mess around with wiping Mac OS, then reinstalling it, then doing stuff with Bootcamp and leaving a minimal amount of the HD for the Mac to boot. If it's intel, just install Windows on the whole drive and be done with it. You might not even need the Bootcamp drivers, I forget what all they make work, the mouse probably. But I'd find them if you can and install them into Windows, just to be sure.

You don't get the *whole* HD obviously, but whatever gets used is really minimal. And there is no Mac OS, it just boots right to Windows. Obviously you can still get to the recovery stuff if you want to reinstall Mac OS or whatever. But you can just make it a Windows machine. My iMac was, IIRC, running Win 10. I don't think you're going to get Win 11, no TPM in your Mac probably.

If you have any kind of USB sound device, one ofthose cheap adapters, a USB microphone with a headphone jack, you can do this all with no sighted help, reformat your Mac with VO, install Win using Narrator, obviously you need Win setup media. Grab yourself a USB drive and generate some.

Windows 11 requires specific trusted platform modules that are not and have never been available in any Mac, so you will only be able to install Windows 10, which as far as I know is no longer receiving security updates unless you pay Microsoft, and even that option is unlikely to last very long. Therefore I strongly advise against using Intel Macs these days. They might still work as Linux machines, but that's all.

As for the aforementioned audio and network problems, it's always a good idea to have a USB dongle with a physical Ethernet port for situations like these, and while the multimedia keys do not work for controlling audio in Recovery, pressing VO+- and VO+= with VoiceOver running has the same effect of pressing the volume function keys in a normal situation. Finally I do not recommend the quickest format option, since all it does is recreate the filesystem structure as if it had no data but without actually erasing the data itself.

so, yes this is possible. I recommended wiping and reinstalling macOS, because I was under the (mis)understanding that the person the OP wanted to sell to, wanted both macOS and Windows OS. That was my mistake.
as I understand things. The way to do this, is to create a bootable thumb drive with the Windows OS software. I think that thumb drive needs to be formatted to GPT, I think I'm saying this right, in order to work with the Mac's architecture.
A partition needs to be made on the Macintosh HD, using fat 32 format. Then, reboot the Mac, hold down the option key, and I believe this will take you to a screen that will allow you to select the windows boot volume, to install Windows directly, bypassing BootCamp.
I'm sure somebody will jump on here and tell me how wrong I am, but in my defense it has been a long time since I have messed with windows on a Mac computer. 🙄

That's why I don't remember any of the steps. I think I got the iMac back in, 2016 maybe? I used it for a few days and then wiped it and installed Windows. But to be fair, I think the latest thing it could run was High SIerra.

Don't use Windows 10 anymore. Windows 11 can be made to run on Intel Macs, but it's a complicated procedure. You have to bypass all Microsoft's requirements and use the latest BootCamp drivers that aren't technically compatible and could break at any time. It's also necessary to manually update between major versions, such as 24H2, 25H2, 26H2, etc because this is technically an unsupported configuration.
You should also install the latest version of Monterey to get the latest firmware for the computer. I wouldn't recommend using macOS anymore either. Monterey hasn't been patched since late 2024 and while you could use OCLP, Tahoe will be the last Intel release and will only get support until 2028.

If you want to proceed, I can try to help, but I don't have this machine, so I can only give general steps.