How to Change Your Mac Region
Are you traveling overseas with your MacBook? Or perhaps, you’re moving to a different country for college or work? In that case, you may want to change your Mac’s region settings. Thankfully, this is quite easy to do.
When you set up your Mac for the first time, you’re asked to select a preferred language and set the region you’re residing in. Although your Mac is set to adjust your date and time automatically, the region selection in Mac has other purposes. Changing your Mac’s region can affect how date, time, and currencies are presented as you use macOS.
How to Change Your Mac Region
Changing the region or country on your Mac is a pretty simple and straightforward procedure on macOS machines. Just follow the steps below to get started.
- Head over to “System Preferences” on your Mac from the Dock or the Apple menu.
- This will open a new window on your Mac. Now, choose “Language & Region” to proceed further.
- Here, you’ll be able to see your selected country right away. Click on the “Region” setting which is the first option in the menu.
- Next, simply use the dropdown menu to select the continent and click on the country you’re currently residing in.
- Changing your region will change the primary language of your Mac too, depending on the country you selected. You’ll be prompted regarding this change. Click on “Restart Now” to restart your Mac with the new changes applied.
That’s pretty much all there is to it.
The restart step is only necessary if Mac automatically changes the language after you switched the region. For example, if you changed the region from Canada to USA, your Mac will change the language from English (Canada) to English (US) and you’ll need to restart your computer for all the applications to use the new language setting.
However, if you don’t want to switch to a different language after changing your region, you can choose to not restart and switch back to your previous primary language in the Language & Region settings.
Depending on the country you selected, your Mac will display temperature in either Celsius or Fahrenheit, show Calendar in Gregorian, Japanese, or Buddhist format, and even use 12-hour or 24-hour clock format.
This capability exists in basically every MacOS and Mac OS X version, so even if you’re not on a modern release you can continue to change regional settings to for measurements, date formats, currency, etc for older Macs too.
Do you use an iPhone or iPad alongside your Mac? If so, you may be interested in learning how you can switch to different language or change the region on your iOS or iPadOS device as well. All you need to do is simply head over to Settings -> General -> Language & Region and set them according to your preference.
We hope you were able to learn how you can change your MacBook’s region as you travel around the world. Did you allow your Mac to change the language in the process? Do you have any thoughts or experiences with this feature? Let us know in the comments!
