Users naturally resort to the computer name that can be easily set via the System Preferences GUI and features prominently in everyday contexts like Network Discovery, AirDrop or iCloud. Indeed, macOS offers several places that may store a machine identifier. Serial numbers and MAC addresses, on the other hand, might be regarded as too verbose, hard to communicate or even as sensitive information.īut whatever naming convention an IT department follows, the inevitable question is: what is the right place to store the machine name on a macOS system? Computer Name

While there is hardly one naming convention that fits all, most of them make use of some of the following factors:īecause a user name and especially a department may not be unique enough on their own, it is quite common to combine both factors with each other or with additional factors. Because of that, enterprise IT departments usually follow a naming convention that makes every machine uniquely identifiable. As soon as two Susans each have an iMac, both machines will have the same name.

While this seems charmingly simple and may work well in small environments like a family home or a small business, in the context of an enterprise with hundreds or even thousands of workstations the default solution will not “just work”, obviously.

Permanence (excerpt) by xkcd under CC BY-NC 2.5Īpple devices are automatically named after their owner: “Bob’s iPhone”, “Susan’s iMac” and so on. When it comes to machine names, unfortunately, macOS does not handle this solution very well. So, when humans need to identify an object in the digital world, the solution usually turns out to be a name that is “human-readable” and at the same time unique enough to allow for a sufficient amount of non-duplicate names. That is because humans are not very good at handling random strings of text but rather prefer names that have meaning to them. While the latter may be an ideal solution from a purely logical perspective, it is not very intuitive in human-machine interaction. In the digital world of bits and bytes, on the other hand, nothing exceeds a unique identifier, especially when it bears the signs of universal (or at least global) uniqueness, which denotes, in essence, a random identifier. In the physical world, referring to a specific object may be a simple task where one can resort to the object’s location, to its visual markers like form, color, and labels or to a telling name.

How do you tell one machine from another?

How to find hostname in mac