What's the Way to clean out my mac ahead of giving it out?

Solution 1:

To give it a full fresh and clean and welcome experience I would suggest you remove all stuff accumulated over time including all non apple aps.

To do that you can erase all the information from hard drive and simply reinstall the OS X.

Apple's knowledge base article has the steps:

• OS X Lion: Erase and reinstall Mac OS X - http://support.apple.com/kb/PH4439.

On most computers, the erase and install takes 30 minutes plus how ever long it takes to download the installer package from Apple's servers. That part is about a 4 GB download if you haven't saved it and follow the above instructions.

Solution 2:

If you have 10.7 or later, erase and reinstall OS X from the recovery partition.

• Hold command-R on startup.
• Open Disk Utility and erase either the main OS X partition (like Macintosh HD, indented below a drive) (or other partitions you have added) or the whole drive. If you erase the whole drive, it also erases the hidden recovery and EFI partitions, but the Mac can still start up in Internet recovery mode, which means that it downloads a disk image for the recovery system from Apple's servers.
• Choose Reinstall OS X.

If you don't erase the data securely, the next owner might be able to recover files with an application like DiskWarrior or Data Rescue. If you have an HDD, you can erase data securely by choosing the single pass option from the Security Options sheet in Disk Utility:

If you have an SSD, see this question.

Solution 3:

The Apple way is to reformat the whole OS so that the new user can use Apple's Migration Assistant to set it up as if they had just got it from Apple.

To do this in Lion and above boot from the recovery partition and use Disk Utility to erase and the other partitions.

Solution 4:

If you want to leave the applications and just delete your personal files, you can create a new administrator account, then log in to that new account and delete the other existing accounts.