Portable Apps

My schools enforces us to use macbooks for school. is there any way to store programs on a flash drive and run them from there. Thank you in advance.

Is your issue that you don't have adequate permissions to install applications? Do you own the machine?

inadaqute permissions, random app checks, and no i don't own the machine

So there are a complete of options potentially available. Most apps on OS X, especially App Store (sandboxed) apps, don't mind getting copied to an external drive. The main issue which you're likely having to contend with is limitation preventing you from running a package installer, or writing to system or libraries, without admin rights. This is where the actual system modifications are happening, not running your apps or games. So if you can get a copy of your app somewhere else, more often than not it might run, although it might not save it's preferences (best guess).

Another option, which may or may not be available, is creating your own system image, and option booting to that when ever you're feeling it. With USB 3.0, it's really pretty performant if you get a good quality SSD, or fast drive. This is done by holding option when the mac boots, and selecting the drive you want. Thunderbolt, or USB on all modern macs.
This second option is also preventable, so you may want to look into this before you shell out for a SSD. You school could apply a firmware block. One way to check for this, is to restart, and hold command + r.


Poke around here, for firmware password utility. If you're set for launch, you can usually install OS X from this utility, as long as your system has a recovery partition. Most off the shelf macs do, but if your mac was imaged, it may not. If your mac does't have a recovery partition, fear not. That same command + r, will instead default to an (slow) internet recovery, where it basically fetches everything we just covered from the internet. It's pretty sizable, so maybe have a book or tablet handy.