How To Change the Name Of Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost. com. Let me show you how to view and change the name of your Mac. 

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

Now if you're asking about the name of your Mac you can mean several different things. First, you could simply mean the name of the model of your Mac. This isn't something you can change but you can certainly view it by going to the Apple Menu and then About This Mac. The official name of your Mac is right here. It's usually a model name like Mac Pro or iMac sometimes followed by a screen size like 14", 16" and always includes a year sometimes with the words early or late or mid. This is the official name of your Mac model. You can't change that, of course. But when thinking of the name of your Mac this is what you might be referring to. 

Now besides that your Mac does have a name that you can customize. A lot of people don't know where to find this. It's part of your Sharing Preferences because the name is used when you're doing things like file sharing or screen sharing. So you want to go into System Preferences and then look for Sharing. Then at the top here you're going to see your computer name. This is the name of your Mac and you can change it to whatever you want. If you have multiple Macs on your network that are the same model it may be more useful to actually have a person's name like I can call this Gary's Mac Pro. Or I may want to name it after the year, 2019, or I might just want to have a number or a letter. You can call it whatever you want although shorter is usually better. You rarely see this name unless you're doing file sharing or looking at your list of devices in iCloud which I'll show you in a minute. 

Now note here there are actually two names here. There's computer name and there's also your local network name which you see right here. It mimics the computer name. It just doesn't use spaces so you get dashes instead of spaces. Now if I were to change this name, like that, as soon as I press Return or if I Exit this screen in System Preferences you can see how it sets the local network name to be that name there replacing spaces with dashes. It's getting rid of other punctuation marks like that apostrophe. You could if you wanted to have different names for the two of these. You could go to Edit and change this to something else. So I could, for instance, have this just be Mac Pro even though my regular computer name is something else. But as soon as I change this name to something else it's going to reset this here. 

Note that when you look in different parts of Sharing you're going to see the local network name repeated. For instance in Screen Sharing it tells me the address to find this computer on the local network for Screen Sharing is this. In File Sharing it's this. You also may see this name on other Macs on the same network here on the left sidebar or sometimes if you click on Network here, if File Sharing is turned On, you would see the name there. So this is the name of my MacBook Pro set in the same location in System Preferences. If I were to change it there I would eventually see this name update here on this Mac. 

Another place you'll see your Mac's name is if you go in System Preferences and then if you click on Apple ID one of the things you'll see here on the left is a list of all the devices that are registered to your Apple ID. It's going to use that name here. Now note it takes awhile to update. So if you change the name don't expect to see this name change here right away. It could take several minutes or I've noted sometimes several hours to see this name change. Also if you go to iCloud.com and then go to your account settings you'll also see a list of devices here and it would use these names. 

Now there's a third thing that you might need by the name of your Mac. That's not the name of the computer itself but the name of your User Account. If you're the only one that uses your Mac and you just have that single account setup then it's easy to think that's also your computer name. It's actually the name of your User Account. Here I could see the Home folder is named after that. So in this account MacMost is the name of the account and the name of the Home folder. If I go to System Preferences and then I look under Users & Groups I can see my user account. So the current user is MacMost. That's the same here as this name. So that's your User Account and you can have more than one user account on your computer. But it's actually more common to be referring to your User Account on your computer than the actual computer name itself. 

Now let's say you wanted to change the name of your User Account. That used to be next to impossible to do. But now it's a little bit easier. I still don't recommend it unless you have a very good reason for changing the name of your User Account. It's kind of dangerous to do. It can mess up a lot of things. Make sure everything is backed up before you even try. Apple has this page here will walk you through the steps. It basically involves rebooting into a different account, changing the name of the Home folder for that account and then changing the name of the account. You have to follow these steps perfectly to get it right and it still may end up with a problem. Certain Apps and certain settings may refer directly to that Home folder name or that User Account name and will now need to be changed after you change the name of your account. So avoid this if you can! 

But if your goal is just to change the name of your computer as it shows up in your iCloud list or as it shows up in your Sharing Network then that's easy to do in System Preferences. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.