I don’t really know how it happened, but when I bring up the Control Center on my iMac, it shows the weather for Orlando, Florida. But I live in Taos, New Mexico! How can I fix the weather widget location?
I’m a big fan of the new Control Center in MacOS 11, actually. It mimics a similar feature in iOS, but that’s good: Why not have the Mac system steal the best features and elements of the mobile experience? The introduction
of new widgets has been rather glacial, however, so we do seem to be mostly stuck with the defaults, one of which is the weather widget. Instead of having it just sit on your desktop – or menu bar – however, it is pretty nice to have it just a click away…
On an iPhone or iPad, the weather widget is tied to the Weather app, so it’s easy to know that you go into the app to adjust and update desired locations to change where the widget will show current and forecast weather. But on the Mac? Not so obvious. Turns out that specifying location is part of the “edit widget” feature. Let’s have a look.
CHANGE LOCATION OF WEATHER FORECAST IN MAC WEATHER WIDGET
First off, yes, “widget” is the official name for the tiny little mini-apps that run within Control Center. Control Center you’ve hopefully already realized, is what you get when you click on the time on the very right edge of the menu bar on a modern Mac system.
Notifications show up at the very top if present, then I have the weather widget, the Screen Time widget, and the slick CleanMyMac widget. A third-party widget! But there’s a problem here: I’m in Boulder, Colorado and the Control Center is showing me the weather for Kansas City.
A logical reaction is to click on the widget with the assumption that it brings up a settings area. It doesn’t…
Close the browser window, we won’t need it. The settings area is found by instead clicking on the tiny “Edit Widgets” button on the bottom of the Control Center. You can see it in the first image if you look closely.
The change is rather dramatic as it spreads across your entire screen, highlighting some widgets and showing all widget categories:
More importantly, notice the “•••” that has shown up over the top left corner of each active widget. That’s how you get to settings and configuration. In the case of the Weather widget, the window flips around and displays this:
Ah-ha! Here’s where it’s getting Kansas City. A tap on the current city name and it offers a list of recently searched locations:
I can quickly choose from this rather odd list of locations (all of which I have a connection to, but that’s another story) but the most useful choice is “My Location“. A click and…
Now to save it. That’s accomplished by clicking on “Done” in the top right corner. The window flips back around and the new location weather is displayed:
We’re not quite done, however. If there are no more changes, updates, or tweaks needed for any of the Control Center widgets, remember to click on “Done” along the bottom to save everything.
Fixed! Not only that but as I move around, it’ll automatically now display the weather for my location every time, whether I’m in North Pole, Gravois Mills, Kansas City, or anywhere else!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Apple and Mac since the OS ran on a 512K unit and the LISA was the big announcement. I have a very extensive Mac help area here on the site and invite you to check it out while you’re visiting! Thanks.
Thanks for this detailed post!
I had a funny situation, where “My Location” was the default in the widget, but it didn’t show the correct location and no weather info. Maybe that has something to do with my general settings re. privacy/location, who knows.
Anyway, by following your steps, I somehow succeeded in making one of my saved locations the default – my actual location, naturally – and all is well 🙂