That calendar picker seems clearly somewhere between confusing and outright broken. [ADDED: Just broken. Click through and they do have incorrect days labeled.] But there are at least two conventions: Sun->Sat and Sat->Fri (or Mon->Sun); the US tends to be the former and Europe the latter.
They should label the days to minimize confusion--I come close enough to messing up reservations as it is--but there isn't really a universal standard for the layout of weeks.
> ... the US tends to be the former and Europe the latter.
Australia is the latter, and so is most of Asia, and .. well, it's probably just bits of the USA that likes to have Sunday as the first day of the week. Date pickers in many US-originating software assume this, which is insanely frustrating for those of us not in the USA / not expecting / not wanting this.
Where were you educated, may I ask? Do you recall if this was encouraged at school or in the home?
(Did you ever wonder why 'weekend' included only one day at the end, along with one day at the start, of a week?)
Growing up I never saw a (physical) calendar that had Sunday as the first day. It's only the past ten years or so they seem to crop up more, almost exclusively online.
I suspect the relatively recent incidence is from shipped-in American culture of course. Similarly I'm seeing increasing occurrence of "February 5th, 2019" rather than the standard Australian / British format of "5th of February, 2019" (noting these sequences aligns with mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy preferences for US and rest-of-world respectively).
> Growing up I never saw a (physical) calendar that had Sunday as the first day. It's only the past ten years or so they seem to crop up more, almost exclusively online.
Hmmm... thinking about it a bit, it shouldn't be too hard to locate historical sources of calendars over the years (scanned in, etc). "Pin up girls" (etc) were popular in places like mechanical workshops, and I'm fairly sure there would be hobbyist collectors out there with collections online. Cultural heritage kind of thing. :)
I did a brief trawl through historical calendars on the ebay, most dating back from the mid 1960's, most from NAB or other large institutions. Surprisingly I noted that they showed Sunday as the first day of the week.
So now I'm trying to remember what calendars we had in the house growing up, and how that fits with locale settings on most OS's assuming that Australians have Monday as the first day of the week.
Checked here on our macOS (High Sierra) build server. In the system locale settings (set to "Australia") it has the first day of the week as Sunday. Which is what I'd expect, as that's the first day of the week I was taught and am used to. :)
Note - I don't think that's as change I made, as I doubt I've gone into these settings before. Not 100% sure though.
Very interesting. GMail uses Monday, but I'd have changed that a decade or so ago had it been otherwise. I checked on kde calendar (something I've never run before) and it's using my en_AU locale - and it's picked Monday. But http://demo.icu-project.org/icu-bin/locexp?d_=en&_=en_AU suggests the CLDR identifies AU as 'Sunday as first day of week', which is highly alarming. Do you know if MacOS uses CLDR, or would it be picking up Apple's assumption about AU locale preferences? (Do you have colour or color settings in your control panel?)
The macOS "System Preferences" (system wide control panel) does have a colour settings area. No mention of CLDR, it's more about the locally connected displays and their display gamut (eg Adobe RGB, sRGB, etc).
They should label the days to minimize confusion--I come close enough to messing up reservations as it is--but there isn't really a universal standard for the layout of weeks.