How to find mac address of network equipment in Mac OS

Any user of a computer running Mac OS may need to know the Mac address of the installed network card while working with network connections. This information is not necessarily needed by everyone, even the most active computer users may not need it, so Apple did not put it in the list of basic information about the system. However, finding the Mac address of the installed network card is more than simple, and there are several ways to do this.

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Table of contents:
1. How to find Mac address on Mac OS via system information
2. How to find Mac address on Mac OS via network settings
3. How to find Mac address on Mac OS via terminal

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How to find mac address on Mac OS via system information

The easiest way to find any information about any MacBook, iMac, or other Mac OS computer is to use the “System Information” section. To view this data, you need to click on the apple icon in the upper left corner, after which the menu will pop up. Hold down the Option (alt) button on the keyboard, and the “System Information” item will appear instead of the top item called “About this Mac”. You need to click on this item.

In the left part of the window that opens, expand the “Network” section and select the Wi-Fi option. Information on the Wi-Fi equipment used on this computer will be displayed on the right. In the “Interfaces” section there is the “Mac-address” line, and this exactly line contains the Mac-address of your computer.

Please note: In this section, you can view information about Wi-Fi networks that were ever connected to a particular computer and also those that were detected.

How to find mac address on Mac OS via network settings

The second way to find Mac address of the network equipment used on the computer would be requesting additional information about the devices in the network settings. To do this, click on the apple icon in the upper left corner and go to “System Settings”.

Now you need to select the “Network” section.

In the left part of the window that opens, select Wi-Fi, and then click on the “Advanced” item to open information about this network equipment.

A page with details will open immediately. Here at the top you need to switch to the “Hardware” section, and the very first line will be the Mac address.

Please note: You can also find the Mac address of the Wi-Fi equipment on the Wi-Fi tab at the very bottom. It says “Wi-Fi Address” – this is the Mac address you are looking for.

How to find mac address via terminal

Another way to find out information about network equipment is to use the Terminal utility, a kind of Windows command line analog. The utility allows you to perform a lot of different actions, including requesting information about hardware components. The main difficulty in working with the “Terminal” is the need to know certain commands that are responsible for certain functions.

To launch the “Terminal”, press Command + Space key combination, and in the Spotlight window that opens, enter the name of this utility. When the required match is found, click on the app to open it.

The ifconfig command is responsible for displaying information about system hardware. Type it and press Enter to execute. After that, a lot of information about the equipment will appear in the Terminal window. Find the “ether” sub-item in the “en0:” line, and it will display the Mac address of your computer’s network equipment.

It is worth noting that through the terminal you can change Mac address of the network equipment, if this is necessary for some reason.

Important note: Do not change the Mac-address unless it is really necessary – it may lead to multiple failures when working with the Internet.

To change the Mac address, enter the following command:

sudo ifconfig en0 ether xx: xx: xx: xx: xx: xx

To make changes, you will need to enter the PC administrator’s password.