Making Swiss MacBook Air think it's British at a hardware level

[tarasy]

OK, bear with me on this one...

• I bought a 2018 (Intel) MacBook Air with a Swiss QWERTZ keyboard layout (it was a bargain)
• Swapped the physical keycaps around to make it British layout (and replaced the missing ones with spares)
• Changed the layout to British in macOS and everything's hunky dory.

My question is this: is there some hacky way I can permanently write to the hardware so it knows it's now a British keyboard?

When I reinstall macOS, it reverts to being QWERTZ.

It's not a problem day-to-day but it just struck me it might be possible.

 

[Ruggy]

I don't think it ever knows what the keyboard is by default, it picks it up from the language.
When you first set up it says 'hello' in about a dozen different languages and the first thing you do is pick the language and the variety of that language. It doesn't know before that.

 

[JPack]

The language localization is based on the model number suffix like LL and ZP. You can’t change the default keyboard layout it was born with.

 

[Nermal]

When you buy a desktop Mac with an external keyboard, each language variant has its own USB device identifier. It may be the same thing going on here: the keyboard's USB controller may be reporting it as a Swiss keyboard.

This is assuming that the internal keyboard is USB-attached.

 

[Ruggy]

The language localization is based on the model number suffix like LL and ZP. You can’t change the default keyboard layout it was born with.

I don't think so. I have an AZERY keyboard on mine as it's French but I always set them up in English and they always start with a QWERTY keyboard and I have to change them. (change them to AZERTY/English)
If it was linked to some sort of French identifier then it would start with the AZERTY and they just don't.

 

[tarasy]

If it was linked to some sort of French identifier then it would start with the AZERTY and they just don't.

When I wiped my machine and reinstalled macOS, the installer launched with the QWERTZ layout and I had to manually change it to QWERTY.

I am convinced it is built into the hardware as @JPack / @Nermal say. Would be cool if there was some terminal command I could run to write a different identifier to it.