Unsticking “Find My” from a Mac after changing my Apple ID e-mail

1. Changing e-mail of my Apple ID
2. Handing off my old workhorse to a colleague
3. Apple chat support actually helped
4. An unrelated but annoying bug

I recently changed the e-mail address of my Apple ID, but the Find My association on the mac didn't get the memo.

This is the story of how I went from a computer that couldn't be transferred to my colleague, to one that could.

Changing e-mail of my Apple ID

To begin with, I had a mac which was signed in with my Apple ID, let's say that it was erik.zivkovic@example.com. I was signed in to multiple Apple service, including "Find My".

When we added "Sign in with Apple" to our web and iOS applications, I had a problem on my hands - I was already signed in to our dev and prod environments using my Google Workspace e-mail, which was erik.zivkovic@example.com.

To test Sign in With Apple, I needed a new e-mail address because my old one was already associated with my Google Workspace credentials (we don't have many-to-one mappings of credentials).

So I did the "smart thing", I asked to get an extra e-mail address associated with my Google Workspace profile, and then I changed my Apple ID to use the new address — erik.zivkovic@example.com.

Handing off my old workhorse to a colleague

After wiping the computer properly I handed the computer over to my colleague who tried to sign in using his Apple ID. Instead of being logged in he was presented with a dialog box —

Naturally, I tried my Apple ID password. But it didn't work, because my Apple ID is no longer erik.zivkovic@example.com, it's erik@example.com.

My computer was still enrolled to "Find My", and was being managed by my Apple ID, with seemingly no way to turn it off.

Apple chat support actually helped

After doing a few rounds with Swedish Apple support, which unfortunately weren't much help, I decided to try U.S. Apple support.

The nice lady helped me understand what I needed to do, shortly summarized below, so you don't have to spend hours chatting with support

1. Make sure the problematic computer is connected to the internet
2. Sign in to iCloud.com using your Apple ID
3. In the map view, there is a dropdown where you can select computers
4. Select the problematic mac
5. Select "Erase Mac"
6. The mac should start erasing remotely
7. It should now be possible to "Remove from account" — do that
8. After erasing is complete
   • Use Disk Utility to create a new partition, APFS worked well for me — call the new partition "Macintosh HD"
   • Quit Disk Utility, then install macOS

You should now have an unstuck computer.

I wrote a Q/A style answer on the "Ask Different" StackExchange for this issue.

An unrelated but annoying bug

I also ran into an issue where I first used a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) filesystem for the disk/partition. When trying to install to the "Macintosh HD" that was formatted using Mac OS Extended (Journaled) I got an annoying error:

After scratching my head for a while I tried using APFS for the file system instead of Mac OS Extended (Journaled). And it worked!

I wrote a Q/A style answer on the "Ask Different" StackExchange for this issue too.

Good Luck!