Hacking an Auction Mac Mini (+ I scored a Lenovo P43s and ThinkCentre) 

Great video a good start for the new year, Happy New Year from the UK.

100 USD for bypass 😂😂😂 This T2 was really pain in the ass for security, even I got a problem for unlocking the mac because the server really bad in my country....

You got there!👍👍 The Lenovo laptop and the Lenovo mini PC., are great finds and the monitors were a good deal.👍👍 I have a 2010 Mac Mini but it's knackered and I shall not bother to obtain any others, as they are to much hassle.

I manage hundreds of Macs, mostly with MDM these days. I used to do thick image restores and internet recovery installations all the time. The issues you experienced with Internet recovery are the same as mine. I lost count of the number of times I tried it with recent macOS releases. It acts like it’s an unfinished or unsupported feature after Catalina. Even USB installers would fail constantly, yet older versions worked. I tried variations of internal storage states, such as in-tact and wiped. I tried different forms of bootable USB media. I tried wired and wireless networks. Apple may be my preference, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to complain about.

IIRC, the internet recovery is installing the macOS that was shipped when the Mac was bought. I guess Catalina was originally installed on your Mini (nice model, 6cores,and 32Gb RAM : great virtualisation machine using Proxmox !) when the first owner got it. I wish my own Mini (2012 model) had 32Gb :-) it runs Catalina very well, I still have to try Sonoma despite to hoping for much (tried it on my also 2012 MacBook Pro, but it felt way too slow to keep it). As usual, nice video.

I got a P43S cheaply a few years back, it's had 3 motherboards luckily paid for in warranty. P series is supposed to be for CAD workstations hence the quadro. The cooling system is terrible, I recommend undervolting the CPU

Don't want to play a broken record, but I'd make sure the mini is functional before spending $100 on an unlocking hack. I'd boot it with a Linux Mint Cinnamon USB installer diskette and look at the system data without actually installing Linux. If it won't run on Linux, it's definitely junk. Since I'm a fan of running Linux on Intel based hardware, my next step would be installing that OS. My friend has a Mac Mini, which we upgraded the HDD to an SSD and maxed out the RAM. He uses it to stream video from Netflix and RU-vid. It runs flawlessly, the video is crisp, and the onboard speakers aren't that bad. You got a nice mini there.

I got a great deal from the surplus sale of the university I'm going to. I got a Panasonic Toughbook CF-31 for $10. The hard drive was pulled, but I put the hard drive from my old laptop as well as swapping the RAM as it had 4 GB but my old laptop had 8 GB of compatible RAM. Then I swapped the HDD out for an SSD (cost me around $20 on e-bay), which changed the boot time from 2 minutes to like 12 seconds. I think it would be around 3 seconds w/the soft shutdown that's the default for Windows, but I have to do a hard shutdown b/c I have it dual booted w/Ubuntu.

You are going to IRL auctions or something ? Where can I maybe try my luck ?

Der P43s war ein Mega Glücksgriff! Die P series sond die workstation varianten. In jedem Fall mit entsprechenden grafikchips ausgerüstet. In den grossen P bis zu Xeon CPUs.

P43 good deal if it works okay

So you now have a Mac that is still tied to an Apple-Id that is not yours and has firmware that was manipulated by "hackers". Sounds good. 🤔

You could have cracked the mini for free over dfu mode lol they got u for your 70$