

Head to the Apple ID account website and sign in with the Apple ID account you used on the Mac. If you signed into your Mac with an Apple ID account, the serial number is tied to your Apple ID account online. If you don’t have access to your Mac, you can still find the serial number in a variety of locations. On the Mac Pro, you’ll find it on the back panel. On a Mac Mini, you’ll find the serial number on the bottom. Your Mac’s serial number is printed somewhere on the Mac itself, so you’ll be able to find it if you can’t turn your Mac on.įlip over a MacBook and you’ll see the serial number printed on the Mac itself, near the “Designed by Apple in California” text. Once you have a serial number, you can do things like check AppleCare warranty status and repair history.You’ll see the serial number displayed along with your Mac’s model number, hardware specifications, and the version of macOS you have installed. If you’re having any issues with this, you may want to just go with the About This Mac approach instead, or have your Mac actually read the serial number to you which is possible from the System Profiler application.

Just as the new versions, if you just grep for “Serial Number” you’ll be presented with serial numbers to other hardware included in the Mac, which is why the “r (system)” qualifier is included. The command results will look something like this:Īgain, the alphanumeric string after “Serial Number (system)” is the serial number. Querying Mac Serial Number by Command Line in Older Mac OS X Releasesįor querying the systems serial number in even older versions of Mac OS X, including Snow Leopard, Mt Lion, Lion, and before, use the following system_profiler and grep string: The serial number will always appear as an alphanumeric string alongside “Serial Number (system)”, if you simply grep for “serial” you’ll find a huge number of returns that are unrelated to the systems actual serial number, thus we don’t do that. $ system_profiler |grep "Serial Number (system)" The results for this string will look something like the following: System_profiler |grep "Serial Number (system)"

On prior versions of Mac OS X like El Capitan, Yosemite, and Mavericks, the following string will retrieve the Macs serial number: "IOPlatformSerialNumber" = "C241BABDLLRP8" How to Get Serial Number by Command Line in Prior Mac OS X The resulting output with serial number will look like the following: On modern versions of MacOS like Mojave, High Sierra, and Sierra, or newer, the following command syntax will retrieve the serial number from the Mac: How to Get Mac Serial Number by Command Line in Modern MacOS Be sure the command is on a single line, as usual with command line syntax. To try this yourself and get the serial number on any Mac OS machine, enter the appropriate command string below at the Terminal, depending on the version of Mac OS X in use on the Mac. How to Get the Serial Number of a Mac from Command Line in Mac OS X
