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.
it's been my experience that apple includes at least computer serial number and the volume id in the certificate. So either swapping the hard drive to another computer or reformatting the volume will cause licensing to break.
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 computerâ€, not “this driveâ€. 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.
And you never will see them discuss it. It's SOP in the copy-protection market to NOT discuss any details of your protection with anyone, ever. It's considered partly a trade-secret, and partly a security secret. It's "security-by-obscurity" for sure, but although it's weak when its your only protection, it
does offer a small amount of added insulation alongside the actual operation of the details that are being hidden. Same way you won't see the bank publishing their guard's schedule publicly - the vault should remain secure regardless of the public availability of the schedule, but knowing the schedule gives attackers information they may be able to use in combination with other weaknesses they find, to come up with a successful exploit. (funny enough I've seen that specific detail called out
twice in the past, much to the embarrassment of the bank's security firm)
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.)
IF Apple is not including the hard drive's SN (and I'm not sure on this) and IF the cloning software they provide is duplicating the GUID of the volume, then no you don't have to worry about it. But time machine doesn't restore the GUID because it's bad practice to duplicate a GUID (
Globally Unique IDentifier) and can cause problems for time machine and spotlight, just to name a few.
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 anymoreâ€. I wonder if end-of-support also blocks re-activation?
As long as the key remains valid, you should be okay. It can make matters difficult though. I spent an entire day at a newspaper trying to get 7 desktop and one server upgraded. One of the desktop macs would no longer boot, and it was not possible to deactivate quark on it. (failed logic board) I moved the hdd to another machine and though it would boot, the license was broke (logic board sn and ethernet mac changed) so it could not be DEactivated to recover the activation counter because it didn't think it was activated to begin with. Two hours (yes really) on the phone with Quark and they finally manually added an activation count to the shop's license so I could get that last desktop fully up. A call to adobe was also required, but they had us settled in under 20 minutes. So, "YMMV". (some software titles give you two or even three activations on a SN, to save everyone a headache)
And
numerous times I've had activation on software break because I did an archive-and-install or full-on-reinstall of an OS over the top of an existing Users folder etc. It's very rare in those cases for me to be able to find something I can move from the archived system folder into the new one to satisfy the software.
