I really like my M1 Mac, but the notch has to be the dumbest design decision in the history of laptops :/ I would accept any design compromise for the webcam, make it grainy / low-res and put it under the display, put it at the bottom so it points up my nose, or move into a small 'corner notch' in the top-right corner so that the camera looks at me from the side ... anything really but please get rid of that stupidly oversized center notch.
Haven't really noticed mine. Even after I've used it plugged into the studio display for a couple of days and go back to laptop mode, it's just such a non issue.
I live with it, the most annoying part being how big it is vertically. It has a weird psychological effect of screaming WASTED SPACE!!! at me, even though I rationally know that if the screen would start below would make for less space.
It's constantly bothering me to the point that I set a background with a black area at the top so that it blends with the menubar. I don't have a problem with the menubar icons though because I keep that tidy and minimal.
I punt on the issue through clamshell mode most of the time though.
To each their own, and TBH I have worse pet peeves.
No way lol. I bought a 15" macbook air and the notch is the one thing I hate on that laptop.
Like seriously, why is it so dang big?! I could understand a little cutout for the camera, but it's not like there's a faceid scanner array in there. It's just a dang camera. They could've stuck the ambient light sensor anywhere else.
It’s an okay solution, not the best, but definitely the most expensive.
Another solution that would have been cool and expensive: if they put a camera in each corner of the screen. Then at least they could have the rounded corners they always wanted. Also four cameras could be used for cool 3d effects and AI to keep your eyes looking at the center of the screen.
It's the majority opinion, infact Apple also believes that the notch is a compromise. Apple has been trying to develop the under-screen webcam tech. They just don't have the technical capability to eliminate it. When Apple and others finally eliminate the notch it will be heralded as the best thing ever.
Few will realize how Apple milked you twice - once to accept the horrible design (that they created), and again to accept how wonderful they are for eliminating the problem.
If you look at it as "the notch took away part of the screen", it's annoying. I see it like "the notch gave me new chunks of screen that wouldn't have been there otherwise".
A customer should care about looking at a retail product with their own POV, not someone else's. This is the classic "you're holding it wrong" response.
This is even literally true as they made the screen (and screen resolution) bigger with the introduction of the notch. Given the existence of macOS's menubar I personally think it's a great design.
I've been using a M1 for well over a year, and until about two weeks ago I didn't know it had a notch.
I don't follow the tech press, who I'm sure discussed it a great length when it was released.
And I'm not personally invested in the Mac, it's owned by my employer.
So I didn't notice the notch until my cursor disappeared while scrolling across the top of the screen.
Just don't think of it as a 15.4:10ish screen with a hole cut out of it, think of it as a 16:10 screen with some extra space on top for the menu bar. Realistically, what you're proposing is to remove the part of the screen with the notch in it to make it a normal 16:10 screen, and tbh that seems like a straight-up downgrade.
I do think the machine looks better with a dark menu bar in the "notched" area though. That's how I have my Asahi Linux system set up.
I don't believe those are the only options. Why is the notch so big? If they kept the webcam the same size and made it a hole punch in the display, instead of surrounding it with a giant blob that still can't do Face ID, it would solve the whole problem.
Just use something like RDM to set the screen size to the choice that is a few pixels shorter. The system will take those pixels off the top and the notch will disappear. The top of the active pixel area will be a bit lower.
I suspect those settings are available in the controller because some Apple engineers also hate the notch.
I really hate it. I lose menu bar applications and application menus behind it literally every single day.
I don't mind that it exists and that some people prefer it to large bezels... I just wish there was a way to say "claim my screen is -X pixels and show me the full menu" like before. Without both requiring one app to be full screen and that crazy scaling mode that makes everything fuzzy.
The notch gives me a larger screen combined with a camera and a smaller body. I personally value these and the decision to use that real estate for the hardware camera is imo quite creative.
I paid a few dollars for the bartender app which solves for the hidden apps. Haven’t thought about it since.
The thing is, I really like the thin bezel, but why has the notch to be so massively big? The camera hole looks like it's just about 3..4 millimeters in diameter.
PS: also looking around, there seem to be plenty of laptops with thin display bezel and no notch, if others can do it, why not Apple?
What you wrote about notch isn't a fact but a (controversial) opinion. Some people feel very strongly about it in a negative way, but many don't care.
Personally, I don't care much about notches, and if you can put the pixels very dark/black (ie. OLED) I don't think you should care either. With Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Transparency you can make the menubar very dark. But to be fair, miniLED isn't OLED.
I am using Bartender to hide items in menubar. I did so before notch existed. Without it, I wouldn't be able to fit my menubar (with or without notch).
You can set screen resolutions which bring down the top of the screen to the bottom of the notch and leave everything else alone. You lose 64(?) pixels of vertical screen but the notch goes away.
Completely agree - I made https://notchbegone.com to help mask it visually when it came out expecting Apple to quickly obviate via their own design updates and yet years later we're still having this conversation.
My tinfoil hat take is that the true primary purpose of the notch is to drive upgrade purchases at some point in the future whenever serious technical advancements are waning.
Hm I don’t have one of those notch MacBooks but it kind of seems like a great idea to me if my understanding of how it works is correct.
I usually use my apps in fullscreen, which hides the menu bar, this has the very annoying side effect that moving the cursor to the top of the screen (where a lot of apps have buttons) will make the menu bar drop down and cover the buttons.
I am assuming a fullscreen app will not extend under the notch, so with this notch thing I imagine I could always have the menu bar visible on fullscreen apps without sacrificing screen real estate and without the annoying animation triggering when I want to interact with the upper part of the app.
Can someone confirm it really works like this? I feel like it would be a huge improvement.
I could deal with a hole punch camera like on Android phones, or a Dynamic Island or something, but why on Earth does it need to be so big? The camera itself is tiny, and it's far bigger than the Dynamic Island despite containing only a camera, and not a depth sensor too. We get that gigantic black notch and don't even get FaceID.
Is it something to do with the lid being thinner than an iPhone so the entire camera assembly needs a cutout rather than just the lens? That's the only reason I can think of.
Personally, I'd rather even have a physical notch extending out from the edge of the screen, like a tab in the middle, than the current black cutout.
You're right about the dumb design decision. There's no good technical reason that it's so massive compared to the single tiny webcam. The only way it would have made any sense was if it also contained the FaceID array of cameras too. This was just Apple going all-in on the notch that was part of the "iconic" iPhone design. Now that the iPhone notch is on the way out, I expect they'll introduce the dynamic island to the MBP in a future update.
I use my mac docked and closed, so I hardly ever see the notch.
However I think Apple should be able to use some fancy engineering to keep the camera as hidden as possible in the edge of the screen surround. Or use multiple fibre optic points embedded in the screen along with those fancy neural processors to create an eye-to-eye webcam.
It's a great use of the space in the macOS menu bar that is otherwise usually wasted.
Moreover, having a good webcam is very important to a lot of Macbook users who would not be able to tolerate grainier cameras or the nostril-peering bottom positioning on some XPS laptops.
It is, however, super annoying that various implementation bugs have not been fixed after years.
> While it offers many features, I've refused to pay for a solution to Apple's poor design decision.
The phrasing of this kind of gets under my skin.
Like, it's fine to call it "refusing to pay" if it's some kind of Apple tax. Bartender is great little indie app, a real quality-of-life enhancement. I like to reward creative developers who come up with solutions for weird edge-case users like us.
I can understand the sentiment. It's not necessarily something against independent developers, it's anger about a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place to a device this expensive.
Windows had a similar problem with its notifications tray growing to unreasonable size, and they fixed that back in Windows Vista, after applying some auto-hiding algorithm in versions before that. Apple missing this problem or not being able to come up with a solution is simply not believable, this has to be the result of them simply not caring or refusing to address the issue for stylistic reasons.
I'm sure Bartender is great software (even without the notch problem, from what I can tell!) but Apple is the one forcing their users to pay extra for their stupid design decisions. $16 to fix a problem other operating systems fixed almost twenty years ago is a steep price to pay when you're expecting a quality laptop.
> I can understand the sentiment. It's not necessarily something against independent developers, it's anger about a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place to a device this expensive.
Especially considering how much people harp on about Apple's amazing UX and quality and how that makes the absurd prices worth it. The notch problem, as well as other UX bugs (like scroll direction having two separate toggles in mouse/touchpad settings, that toggle each other) really don't look all that polished to me.
> I can understand the sentiment. It's not necessarily something against independent developers, it's anger about a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place to a device this expensive.
This. Apple cultivates this myth that they only release polished devices/software. When they fail to do even the littlest things like work with a design decision they made, people, rightfully, get frustrated.
Thanks @jeroenhd for giving me the benefit of doubt and explaining it even better than I could! My intention was definitely not to bash bartender and I need to select my words more carefully in the future.
It was just the only solution I knew before yesterday for a such a simple stupid design flaw from Apple. I have nothing against Bartender or its developers. I just wish I wouldn't need to install 3rd party software to fix Apple's issues.
I think Apple hasn’t followed Microsoft on status item (that the name of menubar icons on macOS) management is simply because they didn’t intend for the API to be used even a fourth as much as it is.
In older releases (back when in it was still known as OS X), persistent status items weren’t something devs could do without dipping into hacks. That part of the menubar was intended solely for system stuff, e.g. the display and sound menus.
There were always APIs for transient status items, but those were intended for use by “normal” apps with a dock icon that you have open only temporarily to accomplish some tasks (which means these status items wouldn’t accumulate). Status items added this way couldn’t even be rearranged like the system ones.
So in short, there’s no management because they’re designing for the user who has a couple of status items, not 5, 10, or 15+.
> While it offers many features, I've refused to pay for a solution to Apple's poor design decision.
Well then you're in luck, because there's a free app called Hidden Bar[1] on the Mac App Store that allows you to hide icons which you're not interested in.
I am not affiliated with the author(s?), I am just a happy user and I would probably be using it even if the Macbook didn't have a notch.
> Well then you're in luck, because there's a free app called Hidden Bar[1] on the Mac App Store that allows you to hide icons which you're not interested in.
Author here: I did try Hidden Bar yesterday before finding this workaround and I uninstalled it today. I want to see all of the 16 apps that I have. I don't want to hide any of them. By changing the whitespace mentioned in the blog post I now can see all of them.
This is only of limited help. If I didn't want a program to have a menu icon, I wouldn't be running that program, or would have configured it to not have an icon. Hidden Bar's entire purpose is to hide the infrequently needed icons, conversely, it needs to expose them when I un-hide icons.
If there are too many, some end up under the notch, even though there's room on the other side of it for them in most cases. That's just Apple shipping a bug and not fixing it.
Still sort of insane that you need extra apps to fix an issue that Microsoft figured out decades ago. The GP says it was in Windows Vista, but I'm pretty sure even Windows 98 had it. I know XP did.
Besides the freeware/shareware issue, I'd like to limit the number of various little tools running on my computer, often with effectively full access to my data (since software that provides that type of quality-of-life improvements for core OS functionality is often hard/impossible to sandbox).
I can't even use most of these on my work Mac for the same reason (it's outright not allowed/possible by policy).
It is perfectly acceptable to provide a zero-cost, command-line focused solution to a single, specific user-interface constraint, while, at the same time, providing additional parametric insight to macOS user preferences.
More than the cost, it's the fact that it's yet another app with its own updater, attack surface, etc that's a bother. (I don't know if this app has an App Store version available -- but in general, even if they are, they're often worse than the non-App Store versions.)
especially considering that apple is full of poor design decisions that people have already been using third party software to compensate for. for example a lack of any form of reasonable window management that the many people use stuff like magnet or rectangle to compensate for. or the fact that mouse scroll direction and trackpad scroll direction are linked. or the fact that you can't control volume on a per app basis.
Handling the app icons properly due to the notch IS something that Apple should have done. It's pure idgaf incompetence on Apple's part. Their software quality has been declining the past few years in respects to macOS.
> Their software quality has been declining the past few years in respects to macOS
Was there a previous version of MacOS where this problem was solved?
I remember literally running into this same problem on Macintosh System 7 when running MS Office apps that had too long menus for a PowerBook screen, there was a third party app back then as well to solve it (by replacing the "File", "Edit", etc menu names with icons to make them shorter)
I think the point is that you shouldn't need to spend anything extra after spending $2,000 on an Apple laptop for something Apple should have already addressed.
> * I discovered a free, native macOS solution that doesn't require installing Bartender or any other additional apps.*
> You can adjust the values from 0 to 6 to accommodate even more icons. Personally, I found 6 to be a good fit.
It's ultimately a really petty point - but this is not a fix. This increases the number of apps on the top bar before the problem occurs. Bartender (and hidden[1] - which I discovered in this thread) fix the problem. Calling a technique that delays the problem "a solution" after sneering at a project that actually is a solution just rubs me the wrong way.
Edit: Though I'll leave my rude comment in its original form, it's also important to note that OP added a note clarifying this may not fix the problem for everyone in what I thought was a mature reaction to a petty complaint.
You're correct that there are certain scenarios that won't be addressed by this. Would it be more fair to say to write that this will only postpone the issue?
To offer a counterexample, I've been using my machine for slightly over a year now, and the number of applications running in the menu bar have stabilized to 16 apps. So this undeniably resolves the issue on my machine and for my usage.
EDIT: I think this was a great point and I added a notice section to the blog post so that everyone using this hack will be well informed to make best decisions. Thanks for the feedback!
I endorse Hidden Bar, it's just such a simple and obvious solution.
I use my Mac with a 43" screen at 4k/1x, so the space in the menu bar has never been a real problem... It's the sheer number of icons and the resulting clutter, especially as they're all tiny, monochromatic, and therefore hard to tell apart.
IMHO, 80% of apps that put icons on the menu bar, shouldn't, but the system doesn't really give them any better place. Lunar (<3) should just hook into the builtin system brightness control; Velja (<3) or Shortcat (<3) should've been panes in System Settings; and so on. And then there's apps that put icons in both the Dock and the menu bar - just why...
Longterm Mac OS users have used tools like Onyx[0] to configure hidden system and finder settings. It's probably one of my first downloads after an OS upgrade.
I learned yesterday about this setting which can be change the default whitespace in MacOS menu bar to get access to apps which would otherwise be hidden under the notch. Many of my colleagues told me they were happy so I thought it might be useful for wider audience as well.
I know that the HN guidelines recommend linking to source directly but I think short blog post with images is easier to understand and I hope this is okay :)
$20 for what should have been the workaround from Apple for their design decision. I mean really, too many icons - have a widget to display the rest on click - the number of times I have to kill Alfred to get to Docker Desktop is more than I can count on one hand.
I think it's worth emphasizing that, while Bartender does solve this egregious oversight from Apple - it also makes a number of enhancements to the top bar that are hard to write off as "bad Apple design". Even if the notch has never bothered you it may be worth your money.
This is a “problem” that existed before the notch was born and has been fixed with Bartender (and clones) for several years now. Anyone with lots of app icons would run into situations where the icons would not all fit on the menu bar. Bartender gave us control and helped reduce the clutter.
The problem didn’t start with the notch, it just made it more likely that someone would run into it.
The notch is what it is: a compromise between webcam quality, branding, and thin bezels. But it’s hard to argue but that Apple’s software integration with it is mediocre at best. None of the extra space is usable except by anything but the awkwardly tall menu bar and the status items or menu extras it holds, and the system not being aware of the notch —sometimes— like letting status items pile up underneath, or being able to put the mouse pointer underneath it but not when a mouse button is held down (this behavior was removed in a late version of Ventura), or putting the picture-in-picture window partially underneath the menu bar (like it expects only a regular-sized menu bar to be there)… is symptomatic of a larger quality and integration problem at Apple, I think.
EDIT: I tried this out and at least it didn't work for me. The whitespace did change a bit after running your command but not as much as happens when I log out and log in.
Hey, I love to bash appl like anybody else, and this notch issue is an equivalent dumb outcome as the magic mouse charging like a dead cockroach or the "you're holding the phone wrong". But my main concern is how EVERY Mac app nowadays feels the need to leave an icon on the "tray" leading to this problem in the first place. Notch or no notch, this pattern just doesn't scale. Am I the only one installing apps to hide the trays icons? On windows this hiding pattern come as default for years.
I find the notch the be an utterly horrible design choice. Like the iPhone notch, it seems like a major step back in aesthetic. I found both too distracting for comfort.
The large amount of white place has been driving me insane for a while, glad to see there is a fix I will need to check this out later.
But I don't understand why Apple did not take a page out of Windows's taskbar. If there are too many make a dropdown. They are already easily draggable and removable so concern about bloat isn't really a concern. If I have them there I want them there and accessible.
I find that I only have a couple, but I have a lot of system services in the menu bar. I currently have (apart from time/date): siri, control centre, the user switcher, wifi, battery, bluetooth, music, volume, spotlight, time machine and keyboard layout. Some of those show up by default, and some I had to turn on (bluetooth, keyboard layout). But that's all just default system stuff. I have only 3 custom apps, and the next one will go behind the notch by the look of it.
I don't have that many, but they can definitely add up. On my work machine, where we have a need to provision multiple VPN options for technical staff working on client projects, I have menu bar icons for 3 VPNs, not to mention SentinelOne, Cylance, and CarbonBlack... and Google Drive Sync, and then a few others for software I've installed.
Author here: @dang other users here helped me to understand that the title is bit misleading. I was just eager to share about this and possibly help others with this knowledge without thinking about this correctly.
This drives me nuts. I resort to quitting applications until I've removed enough that the app I'm looking for is visible again. I did use bartender for a while. I can't remember why I stopped using it.
I found an alternative solution: the application Easyres, a little app that lets you change resolutions from the menu bar, has an alternative resolution that's about 30-40px shorter than the standard resolution. This gives you back the whole menu bar as it sits below the notch. It's a much cleaner look. The notch completely disappears and you forget it ever existed.
I use bartender and try to keep the right side of my menu pretty light on taskbar stuff. I think I do lose a few things on my 14" but anything critical I want in 1 click is on the far right and visible.
I was hoping this article would show how you could make fullscreen apps actually fullscreen. It bothers me that the top of the app sits below the notch - there are some apps where there's nothing in the top middle that the notch would cover, and the apps would benefit from a little bit of extra real estate.
Thanks for discovering that answer, improving on it (with screenshots) and sharing it on your blog which made it pop up here! My comment isn't a slight at all, it's just much easier (for me at least) to rediscover useful StackOverflow answers (by favoriting them) than to find a blog post.
Avoiding excellent hardware because of a software bug is pretty short-term thinking. I want the notch. I also want the OS to behave correctly, given the notch. That's not too much to ask, and no, it's not worth ragequitting the entire ecosystem over. YMMV on that one.
You can change the display resolution to hide the notch on any Mac and it just makes the top bezel appear as tall as the notch is, which is about the same size as the pre-notch models. Same result, newer hardware options.
I would have prefer they at least performed some Dynamic Island UI trickery with the notch when they added it, instead of it just being a quite literal notch out of the desktop that the OS seems barely aware of.
The free app Dozer gives you the ability to move icons into a collapsible section, which also solves this problem from a different angle. https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer
The real point for me is: where were all Apple Egineers when the decision ws taken to add (or actually remove) that notch to the display? Have then been called in at all?
I can hardly think that the decision came from the engineers: that would not solve any technical problem or add any extra technical feature. Just whoes.
The decision likely came from the marketing.
Fancy and stylish decisions (the nothces) on engineered stuff (the Mac) should require the former to beg the latter for a go/no go badge.
I think you can put a camera in any of the 4 corners in a bezel, you can put it (back) in the middle of the upper bezel, maybe in the middle of the lower bezel.
Or ask you Apple fans to use their iPhone as a camera.
Look at where they put cameras in a Tesla. Not where it is nice, but where it is effective under all the points of vieew.
To me the notch is totally useless also in my phone as it doesn't add anything. It rather makes some of my screen real estate unavailable. Just to get a slimmer bezel which is not a useful feature.
I would rather sacrify some of the bezel to get back my perfectly rectagular display without any rounded corners (another pesky marketing-driven decision) or nothces.
Meh!
While I doubt anyone at Apple wants to keep the notch forever, I imagine the engineers justified the notch as adding screen real estate, and rightly so. The display's size ratio is 1728:1117, which is slightly taller than the 16:10 of the older displays—taller by exactly the size of the notch, in fact. So while it's a bit unsightly, it does serve the functional purpose of allowing them to raise the "ears" of the monitor about the size of the menu bar[1].
Prior to owning this Mac, I always set the menu bar to autohide, which wasn't the greatest UX but gave me some extra screen space. Now I can keep the same space and have the menu bar always visible. Seems like a win to me.
[1] Yes, they could have just made the top bezel bigger and had no notch, but that would have have meant having a smaller screen or a larger footprint for the laptop. I don't like the notch one bit, but I think they made the correct choice.
The notch is not the problem. It's free real estate, as the meme says. Older models, and most other laptops which ship a webcam (frankly essential in this day and age), just have dead space the size of the webcam. I'd much rather have a notch and more screen, Apple did the right thing here.
The problem is shipping the notch and not making the menu bar icon layout aware of its existence. That's just lazy, and it's appalling they haven't fixed it yet.
I just dump my default changes here. Maybe somebody finds something usefull for themself. Added the command from this thread too. :)
Edit: Looks like i already did edit this before since mine was already at 8 and 12. Added the original source like its linked above.
I don't mind the notch (I understand the reason it's there and it's a compromise), but it boggles my mind that Apple decided to just place the icons under the notch, where they aren't visible.
This is a clear example of lack of dogfooding: clearly Apple executives do not use many apps, or they would have been infuriated at the stupid problem.
Apple no longer lives in fear of Steve Jobs. This is just the latest brain-dead problem which would have obviously been fixed before it shipped in the face of Steve's cold fury.
I really like my M1 Mac, but the notch has to be the dumbest design decision in the history of laptops :/ I would accept any design compromise for the webcam, make it grainy / low-res and put it under the display, put it at the bottom so it points up my nose, or move into a small 'corner notch' in the top-right corner so that the camera looks at me from the side ... anything really but please get rid of that stupidly oversized center notch.
Haven't really noticed mine. Even after I've used it plugged into the studio display for a couple of days and go back to laptop mode, it's just such a non issue.
I live with it, the most annoying part being how big it is vertically. It has a weird psychological effect of screaming WASTED SPACE!!! at me, even though I rationally know that if the screen would start below would make for less space.
It's constantly bothering me to the point that I set a background with a black area at the top so that it blends with the menubar. I don't have a problem with the menubar icons though because I keep that tidy and minimal.
I punt on the issue through clamshell mode most of the time though.
To each their own, and TBH I have worse pet peeves.
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No way lol. I bought a 15" macbook air and the notch is the one thing I hate on that laptop.
Like seriously, why is it so dang big?! I could understand a little cutout for the camera, but it's not like there's a faceid scanner array in there. It's just a dang camera. They could've stuck the ambient light sensor anywhere else.
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I've had my M2 Air for about a month now and this thread is the only reason I know that it's there. Never would have noticed.
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I agree here. I thought it was dumb but the OS works around it really nicely; the only time it ever got in the way was with some non-native software
> I would accept any design compromise for the webcam, make it grainy / low-res
I think this is a minority opinion.
I personally don't remark the notch anymore.
It’s an okay solution, not the best, but definitely the most expensive.
Another solution that would have been cool and expensive: if they put a camera in each corner of the screen. Then at least they could have the rounded corners they always wanted. Also four cameras could be used for cool 3d effects and AI to keep your eyes looking at the center of the screen.
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It's the majority opinion, infact Apple also believes that the notch is a compromise. Apple has been trying to develop the under-screen webcam tech. They just don't have the technical capability to eliminate it. When Apple and others finally eliminate the notch it will be heralded as the best thing ever.
Few will realize how Apple milked you twice - once to accept the horrible design (that they created), and again to accept how wonderful they are for eliminating the problem.
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If you look at it as "the notch took away part of the screen", it's annoying. I see it like "the notch gave me new chunks of screen that wouldn't have been there otherwise".
A customer should care about looking at a retail product with their own POV, not someone else's. This is the classic "you're holding it wrong" response.
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This is even literally true as they made the screen (and screen resolution) bigger with the introduction of the notch. Given the existence of macOS's menubar I personally think it's a great design.
This. And makes the laptop smaller. I have a notchless M1 13" air and it is almost the same size as my 14" M3 mac, albeit with bigger screen.
I've been using a M1 for well over a year, and until about two weeks ago I didn't know it had a notch.
I don't follow the tech press, who I'm sure discussed it a great length when it was released. And I'm not personally invested in the Mac, it's owned by my employer.
So I didn't notice the notch until my cursor disappeared while scrolling across the top of the screen.
Yeah it's completely invisible if you use a background that's very dark near the top, I haven't thought about the notch in months.
The notch is really noticeable if you have a white menubar.
I'd take a screenshot of it but ... ha!
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> put it at the bottom so it points up my nose
My Dell has a nose cam… it’s so unpleasant a view that it is unusable IMO.
Just don't think of it as a 15.4:10ish screen with a hole cut out of it, think of it as a 16:10 screen with some extra space on top for the menu bar. Realistically, what you're proposing is to remove the part of the screen with the notch in it to make it a normal 16:10 screen, and tbh that seems like a straight-up downgrade.
I do think the machine looks better with a dark menu bar in the "notched" area though. That's how I have my Asahi Linux system set up.
I don't believe those are the only options. Why is the notch so big? If they kept the webcam the same size and made it a hole punch in the display, instead of surrounding it with a giant blob that still can't do Face ID, it would solve the whole problem.
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Just use something like RDM to set the screen size to the choice that is a few pixels shorter. The system will take those pixels off the top and the notch will disappear. The top of the active pixel area will be a bit lower.
I suspect those settings are available in the controller because some Apple engineers also hate the notch.
I really hate it. I lose menu bar applications and application menus behind it literally every single day.
I don't mind that it exists and that some people prefer it to large bezels... I just wish there was a way to say "claim my screen is -X pixels and show me the full menu" like before. Without both requiring one app to be full screen and that crazy scaling mode that makes everything fuzzy.
That’s literally possible… there’s some criteria that will force the display into that mode (although I can’t remember off hand what it is)
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The notch gives me a larger screen combined with a camera and a smaller body. I personally value these and the decision to use that real estate for the hardware camera is imo quite creative.
I paid a few dollars for the bartender app which solves for the hidden apps. Haven’t thought about it since.
You can change the resolution in System Settings->Displays, make it so the entire display is below the notch.
The thing is, I really like the thin bezel, but why has the notch to be so massively big? The camera hole looks like it's just about 3..4 millimeters in diameter.
PS: also looking around, there seem to be plenty of laptops with thin display bezel and no notch, if others can do it, why not Apple?
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It is extremely hidden, but here's how you access all available resolutions, including the ones which work below the notch:
https://support.apple.com/en-ke/guide/mac-help/mchl86d72b76/....
>but the notch has to be the dumbest design decision in the history of laptops
The virtual escape key on the touch bar, all while Apple was pushing their laptops as developer friendly, is magnitudes worse
>but the notch has to be the dumbest design decision in the history of laptops
No, it had been the touch bar. There're multiply solutions for the notch, none had been imagined for that abomination.
I got the original 13" M1 MPB and put some additional "buttons" on the touch bar. Sort of miss it on my 16" M1 MBP.
I've had an m1 max 14" since the week they first released 2-3 years ago and I actually COMPLETELY forgot there was a notch until I read this post.
I can't think of like, one time when it was an issue but I also have probably used TopNotch since then.
I own a M1 MBP.
What you wrote about notch isn't a fact but a (controversial) opinion. Some people feel very strongly about it in a negative way, but many don't care.
Personally, I don't care much about notches, and if you can put the pixels very dark/black (ie. OLED) I don't think you should care either. With Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Transparency you can make the menubar very dark. But to be fair, miniLED isn't OLED.
I am using Bartender to hide items in menubar. I did so before notch existed. Without it, I wouldn't be able to fit my menubar (with or without notch).
I prefer to think of it as two large full-color notches going upwards as compared to a small black notch coming down.
Too bad they didn't increase the resolution of the display slightly for that.
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You can set screen resolutions which bring down the top of the screen to the bottom of the notch and leave everything else alone. You lose 64(?) pixels of vertical screen but the notch goes away.
Completely agree - I made https://notchbegone.com to help mask it visually when it came out expecting Apple to quickly obviate via their own design updates and yet years later we're still having this conversation.
My tinfoil hat take is that the true primary purpose of the notch is to drive upgrade purchases at some point in the future whenever serious technical advancements are waning.
Hm I don’t have one of those notch MacBooks but it kind of seems like a great idea to me if my understanding of how it works is correct.
I usually use my apps in fullscreen, which hides the menu bar, this has the very annoying side effect that moving the cursor to the top of the screen (where a lot of apps have buttons) will make the menu bar drop down and cover the buttons.
I am assuming a fullscreen app will not extend under the notch, so with this notch thing I imagine I could always have the menu bar visible on fullscreen apps without sacrificing screen real estate and without the annoying animation triggering when I want to interact with the upper part of the app. Can someone confirm it really works like this? I feel like it would be a huge improvement.
If that were true, it would be losing a centimeter off the too of the screen, wouldn’t it?
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I could deal with a hole punch camera like on Android phones, or a Dynamic Island or something, but why on Earth does it need to be so big? The camera itself is tiny, and it's far bigger than the Dynamic Island despite containing only a camera, and not a depth sensor too. We get that gigantic black notch and don't even get FaceID.
Is it something to do with the lid being thinner than an iPhone so the entire camera assembly needs a cutout rather than just the lens? That's the only reason I can think of.
Personally, I'd rather even have a physical notch extending out from the edge of the screen, like a tab in the middle, than the current black cutout.
You're right about the dumb design decision. There's no good technical reason that it's so massive compared to the single tiny webcam. The only way it would have made any sense was if it also contained the FaceID array of cameras too. This was just Apple going all-in on the notch that was part of the "iconic" iPhone design. Now that the iPhone notch is on the way out, I expect they'll introduce the dynamic island to the MBP in a future update.
I use my mac docked and closed, so I hardly ever see the notch.
However I think Apple should be able to use some fancy engineering to keep the camera as hidden as possible in the edge of the screen surround. Or use multiple fibre optic points embedded in the screen along with those fancy neural processors to create an eye-to-eye webcam.
> the notch has to be the dumbest design decision in the history of laptops
Agreed. It's such a bad bad bad design. No reason to hide the camera. Just make the bezel taller. Its fine.
It's just as bad as the notch/pill on the iPhone. Drives me crazy everytime I look at it.
Can't wait til we move to a notch free world.
> Can't wait til we move to a notch free world.
Never gonna happen. Apple sales continue to grow despite the notch, so obviously users LOVE the notch.
The notch is here until we can put a camera and any other sensors inside the screen without losing pixels.
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I sold a M2 MBA and bought a M1 MBA because of the notch.
I don't think the notch is inherently dumb.
It's a great use of the space in the macOS menu bar that is otherwise usually wasted.
Moreover, having a good webcam is very important to a lot of Macbook users who would not be able to tolerate grainier cameras or the nostril-peering bottom positioning on some XPS laptops.
It is, however, super annoying that various implementation bugs have not been fixed after years.
> While it offers many features, I've refused to pay for a solution to Apple's poor design decision.
The phrasing of this kind of gets under my skin.
Like, it's fine to call it "refusing to pay" if it's some kind of Apple tax. Bartender is great little indie app, a real quality-of-life enhancement. I like to reward creative developers who come up with solutions for weird edge-case users like us.
I can understand the sentiment. It's not necessarily something against independent developers, it's anger about a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place to a device this expensive.
Windows had a similar problem with its notifications tray growing to unreasonable size, and they fixed that back in Windows Vista, after applying some auto-hiding algorithm in versions before that. Apple missing this problem or not being able to come up with a solution is simply not believable, this has to be the result of them simply not caring or refusing to address the issue for stylistic reasons.
I'm sure Bartender is great software (even without the notch problem, from what I can tell!) but Apple is the one forcing their users to pay extra for their stupid design decisions. $16 to fix a problem other operating systems fixed almost twenty years ago is a steep price to pay when you're expecting a quality laptop.
> I can understand the sentiment. It's not necessarily something against independent developers, it's anger about a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place to a device this expensive.
Especially considering how much people harp on about Apple's amazing UX and quality and how that makes the absurd prices worth it. The notch problem, as well as other UX bugs (like scroll direction having two separate toggles in mouse/touchpad settings, that toggle each other) really don't look all that polished to me.
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> I can understand the sentiment. It's not necessarily something against independent developers, it's anger about a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place to a device this expensive.
This. Apple cultivates this myth that they only release polished devices/software. When they fail to do even the littlest things like work with a design decision they made, people, rightfully, get frustrated.
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Thanks @jeroenhd for giving me the benefit of doubt and explaining it even better than I could! My intention was definitely not to bash bartender and I need to select my words more carefully in the future.
It was just the only solution I knew before yesterday for a such a simple stupid design flaw from Apple. I have nothing against Bartender or its developers. I just wish I wouldn't need to install 3rd party software to fix Apple's issues.
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I think Apple hasn’t followed Microsoft on status item (that the name of menubar icons on macOS) management is simply because they didn’t intend for the API to be used even a fourth as much as it is.
In older releases (back when in it was still known as OS X), persistent status items weren’t something devs could do without dipping into hacks. That part of the menubar was intended solely for system stuff, e.g. the display and sound menus.
There were always APIs for transient status items, but those were intended for use by “normal” apps with a dock icon that you have open only temporarily to accomplish some tasks (which means these status items wouldn’t accumulate). Status items added this way couldn’t even be rearranged like the system ones.
So in short, there’s no management because they’re designing for the user who has a couple of status items, not 5, 10, or 15+.
This is not the same thing as Windows. MacOS users choose to have those things in the menu bar.
On Windows the notification bar was a dumping ground that you couldn't prevent apps from using.
> While it offers many features, I've refused to pay for a solution to Apple's poor design decision.
Well then you're in luck, because there's a free app called Hidden Bar[1] on the Mac App Store that allows you to hide icons which you're not interested in.
I am not affiliated with the author(s?), I am just a happy user and I would probably be using it even if the Macbook didn't have a notch.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066?mt=12
> Well then you're in luck, because there's a free app called Hidden Bar[1] on the Mac App Store that allows you to hide icons which you're not interested in.
Author here: I did try Hidden Bar yesterday before finding this workaround and I uninstalled it today. I want to see all of the 16 apps that I have. I don't want to hide any of them. By changing the whitespace mentioned in the blog post I now can see all of them.
This is only of limited help. If I didn't want a program to have a menu icon, I wouldn't be running that program, or would have configured it to not have an icon. Hidden Bar's entire purpose is to hide the infrequently needed icons, conversely, it needs to expose them when I un-hide icons.
If there are too many, some end up under the notch, even though there's room on the other side of it for them in most cases. That's just Apple shipping a bug and not fixing it.
Hidden bar has the added benefit of not asking to record your screen, an insane thing to consent to for this very basic bit of functionality.
Still sort of insane that you need extra apps to fix an issue that Microsoft figured out decades ago. The GP says it was in Windows Vista, but I'm pretty sure even Windows 98 had it. I know XP did.
How has Apple not addressed this?
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Besides the freeware/shareware issue, I'd like to limit the number of various little tools running on my computer, often with effectively full access to my data (since software that provides that type of quality-of-life improvements for core OS functionality is often hard/impossible to sandbox).
I can't even use most of these on my work Mac for the same reason (it's outright not allowed/possible by policy).
It is perfectly acceptable to provide a zero-cost, command-line focused solution to a single, specific user-interface constraint, while, at the same time, providing additional parametric insight to macOS user preferences.
No, that's clearly not 'I should not have to pay Bartender for its work'; it's 'I should not have to find a third-party who can sell me a fix'.
More than the cost, it's the fact that it's yet another app with its own updater, attack surface, etc that's a bother. (I don't know if this app has an App Store version available -- but in general, even if they are, they're often worse than the non-App Store versions.)
especially considering that apple is full of poor design decisions that people have already been using third party software to compensate for. for example a lack of any form of reasonable window management that the many people use stuff like magnet or rectangle to compensate for. or the fact that mouse scroll direction and trackpad scroll direction are linked. or the fact that you can't control volume on a per app basis.
30% or more of the cost goes directly to Apple, so there are some perverse incentives at play with such unofficial fixes.
You can purchase directly on their website or via Setapp. So, I would count this as an argument.
The App Store fee is down to 15% these days*, or zero if you buy Bartender from their own website.
* For entities with < $1M annual revenue.
I assure you that whatever money Apple would make from this wouldn’t make a dent in even some lower-level Apple pleb’s P&L.
This sort of unbound cynicism isn’t intelligent or useful. It shouldn’t be conflated with being usefully or interestingly critical.
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Handling the app icons properly due to the notch IS something that Apple should have done. It's pure idgaf incompetence on Apple's part. Their software quality has been declining the past few years in respects to macOS.
> Their software quality has been declining the past few years in respects to macOS
Was there a previous version of MacOS where this problem was solved?
I remember literally running into this same problem on Macintosh System 7 when running MS Office apps that had too long menus for a PowerBook screen, there was a third party app back then as well to solve it (by replacing the "File", "Edit", etc menu names with icons to make them shorter)
“Refusing to pay for…Apple’s design decisions” makes no sense when you just spent $2000 on an Apple laptop, in order to not pay an indie dev $16
I think the point is that you shouldn't need to spend anything extra after spending $2,000 on an Apple laptop for something Apple should have already addressed.
> * I discovered a free, native macOS solution that doesn't require installing Bartender or any other additional apps.*
> You can adjust the values from 0 to 6 to accommodate even more icons. Personally, I found 6 to be a good fit.
It's ultimately a really petty point - but this is not a fix. This increases the number of apps on the top bar before the problem occurs. Bartender (and hidden[1] - which I discovered in this thread) fix the problem. Calling a technique that delays the problem "a solution" after sneering at a project that actually is a solution just rubs me the wrong way.
Edit: Though I'll leave my rude comment in its original form, it's also important to note that OP added a note clarifying this may not fix the problem for everyone in what I thought was a mature reaction to a petty complaint.
[1] https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
You're correct that there are certain scenarios that won't be addressed by this. Would it be more fair to say to write that this will only postpone the issue?
To offer a counterexample, I've been using my machine for slightly over a year now, and the number of applications running in the menu bar have stabilized to 16 apps. So this undeniably resolves the issue on my machine and for my usage.
EDIT: I think this was a great point and I added a notice section to the blog post so that everyone using this hack will be well informed to make best decisions. Thanks for the feedback!
I appreciate you taking my very petty feedback! I totally agree that it's a clever change that will allow most people to avoid the problem.
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I endorse Hidden Bar, it's just such a simple and obvious solution.
I use my Mac with a 43" screen at 4k/1x, so the space in the menu bar has never been a real problem... It's the sheer number of icons and the resulting clutter, especially as they're all tiny, monochromatic, and therefore hard to tell apart.
IMHO, 80% of apps that put icons on the menu bar, shouldn't, but the system doesn't really give them any better place. Lunar (<3) should just hook into the builtin system brightness control; Velja (<3) or Shortcat (<3) should've been panes in System Settings; and so on. And then there's apps that put icons in both the Dock and the menu bar - just why...
Longterm Mac OS users have used tools like Onyx[0] to configure hidden system and finder settings. It's probably one of my first downloads after an OS upgrade.
[0] https://titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html
Could you share some examples of settings you customize with this tool? The description on the website seems pretty fairly broad.
[dead]
I learned yesterday about this setting which can be change the default whitespace in MacOS menu bar to get access to apps which would otherwise be hidden under the notch. Many of my colleagues told me they were happy so I thought it might be useful for wider audience as well.
I know that the HN guidelines recommend linking to source directly but I think short blog post with images is easier to understand and I hope this is okay :)
Bartender is an app that will let you hide items/hide items in a submenu. I have no affiliation, and it just works.
I’m guessing there’s something similar open source but I’ve yet to stumble across one that works as well.
https://www.macbartender.com/
$20 for what should have been the workaround from Apple for their design decision. I mean really, too many icons - have a widget to display the rest on click - the number of times I have to kill Alfred to get to Docker Desktop is more than I can count on one hand.
I think it's worth emphasizing that, while Bartender does solve this egregious oversight from Apple - it also makes a number of enhancements to the top bar that are hard to write off as "bad Apple design". Even if the notch has never bothered you it may be worth your money.
Yea, Bartender does its job really well… simple and stable. Would also recommend.
This is mentioned in the third sentence of the article.
HiddenBar
When I open the hidden bar, they still expand "behind" the notch. What am I doing wrong?
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Here is the apparent origin post of this undocumented preference:
Hidden preference to alter the menubar spacing https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/16lpfg5/hidden_prefe...
The author describes tracing Bartender's activity to hunt down the method.
And this blog post mentions higher values than 6 (recommending 12 for NSStatusItemSpacing and 8 for NSStatusItemSelectionPadding):
How to fix Mac menu bar icons hidden by the MacBook notch https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2023/12/16/macbook-notch-a...
This is a “problem” that existed before the notch was born and has been fixed with Bartender (and clones) for several years now. Anyone with lots of app icons would run into situations where the icons would not all fit on the menu bar. Bartender gave us control and helped reduce the clutter.
The problem didn’t start with the notch, it just made it more likely that someone would run into it.
The notch is what it is: a compromise between webcam quality, branding, and thin bezels. But it’s hard to argue but that Apple’s software integration with it is mediocre at best. None of the extra space is usable except by anything but the awkwardly tall menu bar and the status items or menu extras it holds, and the system not being aware of the notch —sometimes— like letting status items pile up underneath, or being able to put the mouse pointer underneath it but not when a mouse button is held down (this behavior was removed in a late version of Ventura), or putting the picture-in-picture window partially underneath the menu bar (like it expects only a regular-sized menu bar to be there)… is symptomatic of a larger quality and integration problem at Apple, I think.
You don't need to log out / in after trying this. You can instead restart the service that runs the menu bar.
killall -KILL SystemUIServer
EDIT: I tried this out and at least it didn't work for me. The whitespace did change a bit after running your command but not as much as happens when I log out and log in.
Wow, thank you.
Someday Apple will expose the gazillion defaults write options in a “Pro” tab in System Settings. One can dream.
Back in the day there was a "secrets" third party preference pane you could install. It would let you toggle a bunch of options like this.
https://osxdaily.com/2009/12/11/access-a-whole-bunch-of-hidd...
How come apple doesn't just 'jump' over the notch and keep displaying icons on the left side like android does?
Hey, I love to bash appl like anybody else, and this notch issue is an equivalent dumb outcome as the magic mouse charging like a dead cockroach or the "you're holding the phone wrong". But my main concern is how EVERY Mac app nowadays feels the need to leave an icon on the "tray" leading to this problem in the first place. Notch or no notch, this pattern just doesn't scale. Am I the only one installing apps to hide the trays icons? On windows this hiding pattern come as default for years.
I find the notch the be an utterly horrible design choice. Like the iPhone notch, it seems like a major step back in aesthetic. I found both too distracting for comfort.
I agree, Steve Jobs would have never accepted such a design compromise.
The large amount of white place has been driving me insane for a while, glad to see there is a fix I will need to check this out later.
But I don't understand why Apple did not take a page out of Windows's taskbar. If there are too many make a dropdown. They are already easily draggable and removable so concern about bloat isn't really a concern. If I have them there I want them there and accessible.
As the author of a current and many past Menu Extras, holy crap! Why would anyone have so many menu bar apps!
I find that I only have a couple, but I have a lot of system services in the menu bar. I currently have (apart from time/date): siri, control centre, the user switcher, wifi, battery, bluetooth, music, volume, spotlight, time machine and keyboard layout. Some of those show up by default, and some I had to turn on (bluetooth, keyboard layout). But that's all just default system stuff. I have only 3 custom apps, and the next one will go behind the notch by the look of it.
I don't have that many, but they can definitely add up. On my work machine, where we have a need to provision multiple VPN options for technical staff working on client projects, I have menu bar icons for 3 VPNs, not to mention SentinelOne, Cylance, and CarbonBlack... and Google Drive Sync, and then a few others for software I've installed.
HiddenBar is a FOSS alternative to Bartender, combined with reduced whitespace it'll be quite nice!
Author here: @dang other users here helped me to understand that the title is bit misleading. I was just eager to share about this and possibly help others with this knowledge without thinking about this correctly.
I already renamed the article on my end and redirected it to a new url: https://flaky.build/built-in-workaround-for-applications-hid...
Can you change the url and rename the submission title to: "Built-in MacOS workaround for applications hiding under the MacBook Pro notch"
Thanks a lot and sorry for the trouble!
This drives me nuts. I resort to quitting applications until I've removed enough that the app I'm looking for is visible again. I did use bartender for a while. I can't remember why I stopped using it.
Author here: Sounds very familiar. I used this exact same "Poor Man's process" up until yesterday :D
I found an alternative solution: the application Easyres, a little app that lets you change resolutions from the menu bar, has an alternative resolution that's about 30-40px shorter than the standard resolution. This gives you back the whole menu bar as it sits below the notch. It's a much cleaner look. The notch completely disappears and you forget it ever existed.
I use bartender and try to keep the right side of my menu pretty light on taskbar stuff. I think I do lose a few things on my 14" but anything critical I want in 1 click is on the far right and visible.
I was hoping this article would show how you could make fullscreen apps actually fullscreen. It bothers me that the top of the app sits below the notch - there are some apps where there's nothing in the top middle that the notch would cover, and the apps would benefit from a little bit of extra real estate.
Oh well, we wait and hope someone figures it out.
Original source of this hack is: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/465674/330523
I recommend upvoting (and favoriting) to make it more findable in the future (including my future self).
Author here: This link is also mentioned in the sources section of the article and I did personally upvote that answer too in Stack Exchange.
Thanks for discovering that answer, improving on it (with screenshots) and sharing it on your blog which made it pop up here! My comment isn't a slight at all, it's just much easier (for me at least) to rediscover useful StackOverflow answers (by favoriting them) than to find a blog post.
People need to vote with their wallets and stop buying MacBooks with a notch instead of complaining.
IMO, complaining is probably a more effective way to get the message to Apple in this case than buying a different computer.
Avoiding excellent hardware because of a software bug is pretty short-term thinking. I want the notch. I also want the OS to behave correctly, given the notch. That's not too much to ask, and no, it's not worth ragequitting the entire ecosystem over. YMMV on that one.
Yes. I bought a M2 MBP because this is the only Macbook that I can find on the market which has the specs I wanted and does not have the notch.
I also hate the Touch Bar, which to me is useless and annoying, but at least it doesn't look awfully ugly, like the notch.
You can change the display resolution to hide the notch on any Mac and it just makes the top bezel appear as tall as the notch is, which is about the same size as the pre-notch models. Same result, newer hardware options.
I would have prefer they at least performed some Dynamic Island UI trickery with the notch when they added it, instead of it just being a quite literal notch out of the desktop that the OS seems barely aware of.
To buy a Windows laptop with a half dozen worse problems instead? Hard pass, I’ll take an even bigger notch instead please.
The free app Dozer gives you the ability to move icons into a collapsible section, which also solves this problem from a different angle. https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer
It doesn't look like it solves the problem.
https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer/issues/168
The open-source Hidden Bar is my current solution to this problem, but I think I prefer this native fix.
https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
You can kill "Core" processes if you don't want to log out/log in
Author here: Can you test this and share a working one-liner? I will happy to add it into the blog post.
I tried few commands like this but they didn't work consistently for me.
I usually use dorian-each gem
I've been using Bartender since before the notch because often the space isn't enough.
This is something macOS needs to handle better. The notch itself only removed some space, but the problem was already there.
All this added padding from the last few releases forces me to believe this is in preparation for a port to iPad or AVP.
EDIT: The hardware is there, it's just a matter of getting the right UX in place.
The real point for me is: where were all Apple Egineers when the decision ws taken to add (or actually remove) that notch to the display? Have then been called in at all?
I can hardly think that the decision came from the engineers: that would not solve any technical problem or add any extra technical feature. Just whoes.
The decision likely came from the marketing.
Fancy and stylish decisions (the nothces) on engineered stuff (the Mac) should require the former to beg the latter for a go/no go badge.
I think you can put a camera in any of the 4 corners in a bezel, you can put it (back) in the middle of the upper bezel, maybe in the middle of the lower bezel.
Or ask you Apple fans to use their iPhone as a camera.
Look at where they put cameras in a Tesla. Not where it is nice, but where it is effective under all the points of vieew.
To me the notch is totally useless also in my phone as it doesn't add anything. It rather makes some of my screen real estate unavailable. Just to get a slimmer bezel which is not a useful feature.
I would rather sacrify some of the bezel to get back my perfectly rectagular display without any rounded corners (another pesky marketing-driven decision) or nothces. Meh!
While I doubt anyone at Apple wants to keep the notch forever, I imagine the engineers justified the notch as adding screen real estate, and rightly so. The display's size ratio is 1728:1117, which is slightly taller than the 16:10 of the older displays—taller by exactly the size of the notch, in fact. So while it's a bit unsightly, it does serve the functional purpose of allowing them to raise the "ears" of the monitor about the size of the menu bar[1].
Prior to owning this Mac, I always set the menu bar to autohide, which wasn't the greatest UX but gave me some extra screen space. Now I can keep the same space and have the menu bar always visible. Seems like a win to me.
[1] Yes, they could have just made the top bezel bigger and had no notch, but that would have have meant having a smaller screen or a larger footprint for the laptop. I don't like the notch one bit, but I think they made the correct choice.
>I think they made the correct choice.
Do you understand how much harder layout is when its not on a rectangle?
The notch is not the problem. It's free real estate, as the meme says. Older models, and most other laptops which ship a webcam (frankly essential in this day and age), just have dead space the size of the webcam. I'd much rather have a notch and more screen, Apple did the right thing here.
The problem is shipping the notch and not making the menu bar icon layout aware of its existence. That's just lazy, and it's appalling they haven't fixed it yet.
> Just to get a slimmer bezel which is not a useful feature
I would much rather have more screen real estate.
And if you need to have a perfectly rectangular display you can just make your apps full screen.
I just dump my default changes here. Maybe somebody finds something usefull for themself. Added the command from this thread too. :) Edit: Looks like i already did edit this before since mine was already at 8 and 12. Added the original source like its linked above.
# Defaults and other Stuff
I don't mind the notch (I understand the reason it's there and it's a compromise), but it boggles my mind that Apple decided to just place the icons under the notch, where they aren't visible.
This is a clear example of lack of dogfooding: clearly Apple executives do not use many apps, or they would have been infuriated at the stupid problem.
Apple executives don't have time to use computers :)
Apple no longer lives in fear of Steve Jobs. This is just the latest brain-dead problem which would have obviously been fixed before it shipped in the face of Steve's cold fury.
I just use TopNotch.
It's not doing what you think it does.
Broken in Sonoma
Top Notch is working well here with 14.3.1.
This app only makes the menu bar black though, so it's not really a fix for what the article complains about.
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There’s a FOSS alternative to bartender
Why would you drop a comment like this without saying what it is?
Sorry I meant to look it up on alternativeto.net but I got distracted because it would have taken me 3 seconds on my laptop. Damn mobile phones
Hiddenbar. It might not be as shiny as bartender but it gets the job done
Do tell
HiddenBar
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