How to Unlock a Mac You Locked With Find My

If you lose your macbook you may want to locked it in find my to make sure no one would take it. When you find it, you may want to unlocked it. You can put in your passcode as normal and unlocked it. This may only allow you to use it as normal for a few minutes then it would suddenly go black and showed a lock. Whenen this happened, you won’t see any writing on the screen and entering your password won’t do anything. If you locked your macbook through find my and can’t unlock it now, here’s what you can do.

To unlock any Apple silicon Mac or an Intel Mac with a T2 Security Chip (models released starting in 2018), follow these steps:

You could be stuck if you’re using a Mac with multiple accounts that another account holder has Find My control over and that person locks it. You need them to perform the unlock in person or read you their passwords. This could be awkward.

1. After marking the Mac as lost, it appears with a question mark overlaid in the Devices view.
2. When the Mac restarts, it shows the macOS Recovery screen with Recovery Assistant appearing as the active app in the upper-left corner.
   • Apple claims the message you entered will appear at startup. It does not, in my testing.
3. The account used to lock the Mac is the only one that appears. Click its icon and click Next. Only one account appears because only one account per Mac can be used for Find My.
4. Enter the account’s password and click Continue. If you don’t remember your password or it doesn’t work, you can click the “Forgot all passwords?” link, which takes you to the FileVault Recovery process. Using that method, you can enter your Recovery Key, reset the password, then restart step 2.
5. If you entered it correctly, “Authenticated succeeded” appears. Click Restart.
6. The Mac restarts again into Recovery Assistant. This time the screen reads Activate Mac.
   • You reconnect with your Apple Account by entering its password.
   • You can select any macOS account that can log in to the Mac, provided you know the Apple Account shown next and its password.
   • Select the account, enter its macOS password, and click Next.
7. You may be prompted to enter your full Apple Account email address; a Mac shows you a portion of it. Enter it and click Next.
   • Your Mac prompts you to enter the password associated with the partially displayed Apple Account address, or the one you just entered in full.
   • If you don’t have that password, click the link below the field, Use Device Password, and enter the last password used to unlock the Mac in a regular session before it was locked. In beta testing, I found I didn’t get a field to enter that password in, but this may have been fixed by the production release.
8. On a successful entry, the Mac restarts yet again after a one-minute countdown. Enter your password when prompted to start up into a regular session. Apple Pay will have been disabled, and your iCloud sync is probably paused as well. When prompted, enter your Apple Account password (or passwords if you have multiple accounts linked to your macOS account).

The first time I tried this with macOS 27, I had to choose Apple menu > Restart after it wouldn’t proceed. Then I followed steps 5 and 6 above again, and it worked.

If your Apple Account gets locked

If you try this too often, as I did while testing, or for other security reasons only Apple knows, your Apple Account may be locked. At step 6, I was told I had to reset my Apple Account password from one of my other devices; all four of which are linked to the account were shown. I made that change. In one of the public beta versions, clicking Unlock Account did nothing before or after changing. I was able to click Cancel, complete step 6 again with the new Apple Account password, and proceed to step 7 and restart.

The alert’s title reads Update Phone Number, even though there is no opportunity to do so. This may be fixed by Apple later, though I doubt it.

Apple’s email is out of date

The process above was documented using macOS 27, and Apple has made slight tweaks and major improvements over the last few years. However, the company appears unable to shake off the vestiges of the past. Years ago, when you locked your Mac, you had to set a passcode to unlock it. While that isn’t supported with Apple silicon Macs or Intel Macs with the T2 Security Chip, the email Apple sends out still shows a thumbnail screen where you would enter that code and tells you that you can only unlock your Mac with that non-existent passcode.