How do I set the primary boot display on Mac?

How do I set which monitor is used at boot time?


I know I can drag the little menu bar image to whatever monitor I want as my main screen; that's been around for decades. Back in the Mac OS 9 days you could also drag the Happy Mac icon to whatever monitor you wanted the system to use during the boot process, but I can't seem to find how to bring that up now. Did they just never get around to re-implementing that feature when they transitioned to OS 10?

Earlier Mac models

Posted on Feb 4, 2026 8:50 PM

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How do I set the primary boot display on Mac?

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