Can’t Delete Original Admin User on macOS High Sierra

Ambrose Little
2 min readNov 10, 2017

I recently migrated to a new MacBook Pro. The old one was on High Sierra, but the new one wasn’t. So I created a temp “admin” account to do the upgrade, then do the migration with Migration Assistant.

All seemed okay, but when I went to delete the original user account, I couldn’t. And I don’t mean “you don’t know how to delete accounts” couldn’t. I mean, I tried every possible way, and it wouldn’t couldn’t.

I found this thread on the Apple forums with people having the same problem. After trying everything else…

Ambrose Little

Experienced software and UX guy. Principal Software Engineer at GLG. 8x Microsoft MVP. Book Author. Husband. Father of 7. Armchair Philosopher.