While most consumers may never have to use a remote management application, enterprise users find themselves needing help from manufacturers and service providers all the time. Since the support team can’t show up at your door each time, you need help with your MacBooks, there must be a way to connect to them.
And that’s where remote management for MacBooks comes in. By using remote management software, anyone can control your computer remotely, complete tasks on your behalf, and fix software flaws without having to appear in person.
While you may receive help installing remote management software on your computer, the problem usually comes when it’s time to remove it. In this article, I’ll show you some of the advantages of a remote management app and how to remove remote management from MacBook.
What’s Remote Management on a MacBook?
Remote management is not a MacBook-specific feature; it’s available on all computers running macOS, and in other forms, on computers generally. There are many use cases for remote management software, but I’ll list a few here.
One of the most practical use cases is having a customer support agent fix an issue on your MacBook without physically accessing it. When you give them the details to access the computer, they can easily log in from their end and control your computer from their computer.
Another use case is accessing your primary from a secondary computer on the go. For instance, if you use a powerful Mac Pro and a less powerful MacBook Pro, you may want to access information on the primary computer from your laptop. Instead of waiting until you can get back to your rig, you can easily access whatever you want from your secondary device.
While we could go on and on about the benefits of remote management, there are also many reasons leaving the feature active could be detrimental to your MacBook. For the utmost security, you don’t want to leave any endpoints that could lead to a malicious attack open.
When you enable remote management on your MacBook, the computer on the other end can always access it until you manually disable that privilege. That’s a very dangerous endpoint that you don’t want to leave open since you don’t know who may end up with the computer in the future.
Advantages of Remote Management on MacBook
Before removing the remote management feature from your MacBook, you may want to see all the features that it offers to see if you may ever need it in the future. For that, here are some of the best things you can do with remote management that might make it worth keeping.
- Accessibility
A remote desktop connection makes a computer accessible to you, regardless of your location. It also makes a computer easier to be accessed by anyone offering professional services, saving you the cost of having to walk down to the store manually.
Also, setting up a remote desktop connection makes it easy to access software installed on another computer. That way, you can buy a secondary computer with low storage to save money, knowing fully well that you can access your heavy software whenever you need to.
- Security
Without the remote management feature, the only other feasible option is giving someone your computer whenever they need to help you set something up. While this may also work, you don’t know what they’re doing with your computer, and that poses a huge security risk.
While there’s also a risk of allowing other people to access your computer using the remote management feature, that’s beside the point. There’s a better chance of someone hijacking your computer if you give it to them than when you use remote management.
How to Remove Remote Management from MacBook
If you fancy the features associated with remote management on a MacBook, you may want to learn how to enable it on your MacBook. If that’s exactly what you’re after, this section will show you how to set up remote management on MacBook.
To enable the feature, you’ll need to open System Preferences from the Apple menu in the status bar. Select the Sharing option from System Preferences and click on Remote Management from the resulting page.
You should get a dialog box asking to select how much you want the connecting Mac to access on your computer. After setting up remote management this way on your computer, you can enter the ssh command, followed by the username of the Mac and the IP address of the Mac separated by an @ sign.
How to Remove Remote Management from MacBook
At the moment, the remote management feature is not optional; it comes with every MacBook and it is irremovable. However, you can always disable the feature when you’re not using it, to avoid any unauthorized connections to your MacBook.
To disable the remote management feature on your MacBook, head over to System Preferences and select Sharing from the options. On the next screen, you’ll see options for Remote Management, among many other similar features. Simply check the box before “Remote Management” to disable the feature on your computer.
That way, it becomes impossible for someone to connect to your MacBook using the remote management feature. Since you technically didn’t remove it from your computer, you can always enable the feature whenever you need to use it for something on your computer.
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Conclusion
If you have multiple computers running macOS, one feature you should consider trying is the remote management feature. While most people use it for connecting with experts to fix software issues on their computer, you can also use it to connect two computers running macOS.
When you enable remote management on your computer, you want to remove it as soon as it has served its purpose. However, since it’s a built-in macOS feature, you can’t really “remove” it. The best you can do is to disable it, and this guide shows you how to do that on a Mac.