Pros and cons of wiping a new Mac?

There are several disadvantages:

  • Most internet posts describing how to reinstall OS X miss the hardware specific diagnostic boot image that is stored on Recovery HD (this has changed starting with El Capitan 10.11).
  • You will lose the iLife apps if you don't first boot the factory OS and claim those redemptions to an Apple ID.

The recovery boot isn't a deal breaker if you don't mind using a generic internet recovery boot image when needed. Or you can find and reinstall the following folder on the 'Recovery HD':
/com.apple.recovery.boot/.diagnostics

So, your call on what happens when pressing and holding the 'D' button at startup.

Losing iMovie, Photos (or iPhotos if the Mac shipped with that as well/instead), GarageBand doesn't matter if you purchased the hardware under a DEP program or don't care to use those or already have them or don't care to spend money later to buy them as needed.


There isn't any advantage to wiping and reinstalling OS X on a new Mac direct from Apple. You'll end up with the exact same drive contents. I can't think of any difference between an Apple-imaged Mac and a self-imaged Mac.


No, Apple doesn't have any bloatware. But I still see two advantages:

  • Free up some space (precious if you have 128 GB SSD) if you won't be using iLife apps such GarageBand or use Office instead of iWork apps. They can consume a few gigabytes. And you will be still able install them later as when you first run Mac App Store, it will run a check of your serial number to see if you're eligible to download it for free.
  • Consider splitting Fusion Drive to two drives - fast SSD for system, apps and home folder, and large HD for other, more space consuming media such as videos. Of course out-of-box FD is working well but geeks like us might want to be more in control of what's happening with our data.

Apple Diagnostics can be loaded from Internet with option-D. This lists the disk images which are loaded.

Just a warning - some apps such as Adobe won't work with case-sensitive format.