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.
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.
I think this is a minority opinion.
I personally don't remark the notch anymore.
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.
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.
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.
My Dell has a nose cam… it’s so unpleasant a view that it is unusable IMO.
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 suspect those settings are available in the controller because some Apple engineers also hate the notch.
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.
I paid a few dollars for the bartender app which solves for the hidden apps. Haven’t thought about it since.
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?
https://support.apple.com/en-ke/guide/mac-help/mchl86d72b76/....
The virtual escape key on the touch bar, all while Apple was pushing their laptops as developer friendly, is magnitudes worse
No, it had been the touch bar. There're multiply solutions for the notch, none had been imagined for that abomination.
I can't think of like, one time when it was an issue but I also have probably used TopNotch since then.
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).
Too bad they didn't increase the resolution of the display slightly for that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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+.
On Windows the notification bar was a dumping ground that you couldn't prevent apps from using.
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
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.
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.
How has Apple not addressed this?
I can't even use most of these on my work Mac for the same reason (it's outright not allowed/possible by policy).
* For entities with < $1M annual revenue.
This sort of unbound cynicism isn’t intelligent or useful. It shouldn’t be conflated with being usefully or interestingly critical.
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’m guessing there’s something similar open source but I’ve yet to stumble across one that works as well.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Do you understand how much harder layout is when its not on a rectangle?
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 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.
Hiddenbar. It might not be as shiny as bartender but it gets the job done
> 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.
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 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...
I recommend upvoting (and favoriting) to make it more findable in the future (including my future self).
I tried few commands like this but they didn't work consistently for me.
ps -A | grep Core | awk '{ print $1 }' | xargs kill -9
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.
killall -KILL SystemUIServer
Someday Apple will expose the gazillion defaults write options in a “Pro” tab in System Settings. One can dream.
https://osxdaily.com/2009/12/11/access-a-whole-bunch-of-hidd...
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 :)
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...
The problem didn’t start with the notch, it just made it more likely that someone would run into it.
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 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!
Oh well, we wait and hope someone figures it out.
https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
brew install --cask hiddenbarThis is something macOS needs to handle better. The notch itself only removed some space, but the problem was already there.
EDIT: The hardware is there, it's just a matter of getting the right UX in place.
# Defaults and other Stuff
sudo scutil --set HostName nix
# https://macos-defaults.com/
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode -bool true
defaults write NSGlobalDomain PMPrintingExpandedStateForPrint -bool true
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false
defaults write com.apple.dock "autohide-delay" -float "0" && killall Dock
defaults write com.apple.dock "autohide-time-modifier" -float "0.3" && killall Dock
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowScrollBars -string "Always"; killall Finder
defaults write com.apple.screencapture "disable-shadow" -bool "true"
defaults write com.apple.dock "tilesize" -int "38" && killall Dock
defaults write com.apple.dock "mineffect" -string "scale" && killall Dock
defaults write com.apple.finder "ShowExternalHardDrivesOnDesktop" -bool "false" && killall Finder
defaults write com.apple.finder "ShowRemovableMediaOnDesktop" -bool "false" && killall Finder
defaults write com.apple.dock "mru-spaces" -bool "false" && killall Dock
defaults write com.apple.TimeMachine "DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup" -bool "true"
defaults write com.apple.dock "enable-spring-load-actions-on-all-items" -bool "true" && killall Dock
defaults write com.apple.Music "userWantsPlaybackNotifications" -bool "false" && killall Music
# https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2023/12/16/macbook-notch-and-menu-bar-fixes/
# https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/16lpfg5/hidden_preference_to_alter_the_menubar_spacing/
# https://flaky.build/native-fix-for-applications-hiding-under-the-macbook-pro-notch
# https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39343919
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 8
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 12
# https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/16ra8di/metal_hud_enabledisable_shortcut/
# https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/1271048e407543d391415934cad5edcd
defaults write -g MetalForceHudEnabled -bool YES
/bin/launchctl setenv MTL_HUD_ENABLED 1