Originally Posted By: Virtual1
So I urge you to sign out of any licensed services before making significant hardware changes or discarding your gear.

Thanks for your view on this subject. I see how it *could* matter for activations and certificates, but if Apple authorizes devices based on hardware IDs other than the drive, then one could exchange drives all that you want, and it wouldn’t make a difference. The point is, we don’t know how they do undisclosed things. But the drive (and ram) seem like easily exchangeable parts that *shouldn’t* be part of an identification protocol.

Apple doesn’t seem to mention any of this on their website, and I didn’t even find similar questions from others. Not how they register services and applications, and no advice on the matter of services and drives. The documentation routinely mentions “authorize this computer”, not “this drive”. As the laptop is out of regular AppleCare, Apple themselves won’t handle my tech support questions, except for AppleCare Pay-Per-Incident Support at $29 per question, I suppose.

I did contact the always helpful OWC, and their support person said on signing out of services “No, that would not be necessary to do before you go through the data transferring process.” (And I realize it will probably work just fine; but I wouldn’t know if an activation counter has gone up (or down), which might have been prevented.)

Besides Apple’s products, it might include MS Office as well. The previous one, so just out of support (Oct. 10). If something blocks, I suppose they could say “we can’t help you anymore”. I wonder if end-of-support also blocks re-activation?