Looking for help naming the Home Folder.

Continued....

Simplifying appeals to me.

Try to stop using your macOS user login accounts and Home Folder names to identify your computers. I think that will help you the most. Maybe think about it this way. Lets say you have multiple file cabinets in your office (represents each computer). You label one file cabinet as "Personal", and another as "Work", and perhaps another one as "Charities". And each file cabinet has a full drawer assigned to you (bob) and another one for your wife (mary).

While macOS by default will assign the computer name by using part of your user account name along side the basic model of the device, this is not required.....You can manually edit the computer name to whatever you wish and it is much simpler than changing the user account name & Home Folder names. Within macOS you can customize the computer name so it would show as "MBPro 2022", or "LivingRoom-Mac", etc. :

Change your computer’s name or local hostname on Mac - Apple Support

Think about the form which macOS presents to you when creating a new user account. It asks for your first & last name. While you can fill it out with whatever you want, it should have a name associated with you (real name, nick name, avatar name). Or if you wish to separate work & personal accounts on a single computer, then perhaps you would name them "bob-work" and "bob-personal" (only the hyphen is allowed as a special character in the short user names).

When repurposing older systems for other uses:

Plus when you repurpose those older systems, it would be a good idea to perform a clean install of macOS & set them up again as "new" if they will be used for other things....with 2018+ models, you can easily perform an "Erase All Contents & Settings" so only macOS itself remains as if you had just performed a clean install.... you are presented with a Setup Assistant for configuring the Mac again as if "new".

I guess you could just create a new admin user account, then delete the old user accounts if you still want to retain all of the existing software, but this may not be quite as good with the M-series Macs with their new concept of ownership (first user account created is considered the "owner"....it really is not clear how the "owner" concept really works, but it has been known to cause issues when trying to update/upgrade macOS on an M-series Mac).

Edit: Here is @Ziatron's other post which inspired this new post about macOS user account/Home Folder names as they were encountering issues migrating to new systems & updating old devices:

Dropbox, need advice when I get a new Mac. - Apple Community

Ziatron wrote:

I'm wondering if I'm doing this all wrong. Going forward, should I use names like “bobmac”, “marymac” “livingmac” (I have a Mac in the living room that we use for playing music only.), “laptop” (for my MacBook).

Like I mentioned in the other thread, most people tend to use their own names (or perhaps an avatar name) for their macOS user accounts. From the examples you have listed here......"bob", and "mary" would be typical names....why bother adding the "mac" to each one?

For a shared computer, you can have a more generic name to indicate everyone has access to a single user account (not a good idea generally, but for how you are using that Mac to play music only it is Ok). "musicbox" or "musicplayer" may be an option. Depending upon circumstances, you may wish to have the macOS user account associated with playing music to be more limited....in that case create the first user as an admin account, and the second user as a limited Standard User account.

I have also gotten the advice that ALL 5 of my Macs could / should have the same identical Home Folder name.

People usually just use their own name for a user account, then migrate to another computer which transfers that account to it. This is kind of how it usually works if you will be using it the same way. See above for the exception when a computer is repurposed for something else, or is going to be accessed by multiple people for just a single purpose such as playing music.

It's becoming clear to me the changing the Home Folder name every time I get a new Mac is not the way to go.

You are using the macOS user account names like network/computer identifiers. macOS user login accounts are not meant to identify a computer. macOS provides another field for the actual name of the computer which would be shown to others when access/shared across the network.

Change your computer’s name or local hostname on Mac - Apple Support

The Home Folder name just reflect the macOS user account name (short name). That's it. It is not meant to identify the Mac.

I've had a couple of friends tell me that it is generally advisable to use the same Home Folder name on multiple Macs if they are on the same Apple account, as it simplifies management and improves consistency across devices.

I only use Contacts & Messages, so I cannot say if that makes any difference or not. I will defer to those more knowledgeable about AppleID/iCloud accounts & macOS user accounts. I don't think a macOS user account has any bearing or effect on AppleID/iCloud accounts since everything is based on the AppleID, but I may be wrong on with that thinking.

Ziatron wrote:

>> Like I mentioned in the other thread, most people tend to use their own names (or perhaps an avatar name) for their macOS user accounts. From the examples you have listed here......"bob", and "mary" would be typical names....why bother adding the "mac" to each one? <<

The Home Folder on her old Mac is "macmini2018", you can see why I don't want to use that on her brand new 2025 Mac mini.

All 5 of our Macs have the same user account. Our household is just myself, and my wife. Our Macs all have the same password. Either one of us has complete and full access to all 5 Macs. Considering all of this, moving forward, why don't I just name all 5 of my Home Folders? "Home".

(It is not my intention to rename Home Folders on all of our Macs right now, I just want to set up her Mac in the easiest way. Going forward, as we replace our Macs overtime, I would follow this protocol.)

I am mystified as to why you are renaming home folders. I have several Macs, the home folder on all of them has my short username. Which is the same on all these Macs except my work Mac which requires a different short username by my employer. Each Mac has a unique name, however. I don't understand why one wants to have different home folder names on different Macs. I just use the System default home folder name on each Mac. There must be some advantage otherwise you would not be doing this but I can't discern what it is.

Ziatron wrote:

It's becoming clear to me the changing the Home Folder name every time I get a new Mac is not the way to go.

Simplifying appeals to me.

Changing the Home folder name of your user/home folder is not advised. It certain can lead to complications.

Apple support reference—

Change the name of your macOS user account and home