How to Rename Mac Computer Name in MacOS Sonoma & Ventura

Renaming your Mac computer name offers a way to customize your Mac, differentiate it between other machines when using AirDrop, and make it easy to identify on a network.

With modern versions of macOS Ventura 13 and newer, how you change a Mac computer name is different than before, and you may have become accustomed to the previous approach which was fairly obvious in a system preference. With macOS Ventura, the setting is less than obvious, but you can still change and rename your Mac easily once you learn how to perform the action.

How to Change Mac Computer Name in MacOS Sonoma & Ventura

Renaming a Mac is simple enough in macOS Sonoma or Ventura, but it is not obvious, here’s how it works:

1. Go to the  Apple menu and choose “System Settings”
2. Choose the “General” system settings from the side menu
3. Click on “About”
4. Look for “Name” and click on the text to the right of that to edit the computer name of the Mac, then hit Return or click away when finished

And there you go, you have changed the name of your computer in macOS Sonoma and macOS Ventura.

The change in the Mac computer name will reflect not only locally on the Mac, but also as it is identified to you and others through AirDrop, networking, and the computers hostname.

Generally speaking, it can be helpful to label a Mac as something vaguely descriptive and appropriate for the particular computer, for example naming a Mac as “Bob’s M2 MacBook Air”. Some people like to name their computers as if they were other items, boats, people, or pets, so naming it something like “Oslo” is reasonable if you’ll remember it, even if it lacks any description as to what the actual computer is.

In modern Apple design fashion, there is no indicator to suggest that the Name field can be edited, especially given that all the other fields for chip, memory, serial number, etc, can not be edited, so you’d be forgiven for not knowing this is where and how to change the computer name on a Mac running macOS Ventura. Contrast this new approach to the very obvious “Computer Name” field on prior versions of Mac OS system software, and can understand why some feedback on finding and using System Settings in macOS Ventura has been less than positive. This has caused some confusion and frustration amongst some users who were accustomed to how the system preferences were arranged for the entirety of Mac OS X and all of macOS until Ventura came along with its complete overhaul.

Now that you know how to change your Macs computer name, will you be renaming your Mac? Or do you keep the Mac set as the default computer name?