When having Apple Calendar calculate the travel time it uses my work location as “from” although I am at home using my Mac mini .
How can I have the app use my actual (home) location.
Location services is turned on and my Contacts card contains the correct home address in an entry called “home”.
Model Identifier: Mac14,3
System Version: macOS 15.3.2 (24D81) (Sequoia)
It shouldn’t be using any fixed location, and I don’t think you can (or should) specify a location to use for travel-time calculation.
It should be using the device’s actual location, as determined by GPS (if available, like on a phone) or by other location-relevant data, like nearby Wi-Fi access points or IP address (which will frequently be inaccurate).
If your Mac has location services disabled, or blocked from Calendar, then it’s going to fall back to something like a last-cached location.
But I question why you want to be able to specify the location to use for these time estimates. If you’re not physically at the expected starting point, you will want the estimate based on where you are. You (probably) want the alarm to tell you when it’s time to start traveling to the destination, not the time you would have to leave if you were somewhere else.
For MacOS calendar, the support site says this for “time to travel”:
You receive a notification based on your likely location before the event starts, the event’s location, and current traffic or transit conditions before you need to leave, when you need to leave, and if you’re running late.
So I wonder if it determines from your significant locations and the start time of the event whether you will be at home or at work? I’m not sure.
I’m retired and set my work location to home so I don’t have trouble with this. So perhaps setting the work location in your “you” contact to your home address would help with this?
I often thought it took the “work” location from my contact card in Contacts that I marked as the “me” card. No data to back that up.
Wow. So that’s even fuzzier.
I wonder if your “likely location” is simply weasel-words reflecting the fact that location services are not always accurate (especially if it can only use your IP address to get a location), or if they are doing some kind of ML/probability analysis to determine where you are likely to be at various times, in order to give a consistent estimate when you read the value from different locations.
The latter would be cool. And it might explain why it assumes you’re leaving from your work location, if you are typically at work in the hours prior to the event’s starting time.
That’s a good idea to set the work location to home (I’m retired, too). Will give this a try. Thanks.
