What is inside the MacBook notch?

The FaceTime camera and the sensors that adjust the screen's brightness and colour. There is no Face ID: the MacBook does not have the iPhone's depth sensors.

Why do menu bar icons disappear behind the notch?

When there are more menu bar icons than fit to the right of the notch, macOS does not draw the ones that do not fit. The apps keep running but you cannot reach them. Remove icons you do not need, use a menu bar manager that collects them in a hidden menu, or lower the display resolution.

Can you hide the MacBook notch?

Not physically: it is a cutout in the panel. You can make it invisible with a dark wallpaper, which turns the menu bar dark so the notch blends into it, or with an app that draws a black band along the top edge, at the cost of that strip of screen.

How do I fix an app that is cut off by the notch?

Select the app in Applications, choose Get Info (Command-I) and turn on the option to scale it to fit below the built-in camera, then reopen the app.

How to use the MacBook notch

Updated 29 September 2026.

The MacBook notch splits people: some stop noticing it after the first day, others look for a way to make it disappear straight away. This page answers three different questions — what is inside it, what macOS already does with it, and what you can make it do — because whoever lands here usually has only one of them in mind.

What is inside

The FaceTime camera and the sensors that adjust the brightness and colour balance of the screen. Apple cut that space out to let the panel reach the top edge: the notch does not take screen away, the screen grew around it. On either side of it sits a menu bar that used to be part of the main screen area.

What is not inside is Face ID. The MacBook does not have the iPhone’s depth sensors, and no update will add them.

What macOS already does, with nothing to install

It keeps the menu bar to the sides. The menus on the left and the icons on the right arrange themselves around the cutout, and the system avoids putting anything underneath it.

It hides it in full screen. When an app goes full screen, macOS normally moves the content below the notch and fills the band around it with black: during a film or a presentation the cutout stops existing.

It has an option for apps that handle it badly. A few older programs draw their interface all the way to the top and end up cut off. You fix it once: select the app in the Applications folder, choose Get Info (⌘I) and turn on the option to scale to fit below built-in camera. The exact wording shifts a little between macOS versions, but it is the only option that mentions the camera. Then reopen the app.

The real annoyance: icons that vanish behind it

This is the problem that sends most people searching for how to get rid of the notch, and it is not the notch: it is the icons. If you have a lot of them in the menu bar, the ones that do not fit in the space to the right of the cutout are simply not drawn. They do not go behind it; they disappear, and the app keeps running with no way to reach it.

There are three ways out:

Fewer icons. In System Settings you can remove the system’s own items you never use, and most apps have a setting to hide theirs.
A menu bar manager, such as the free, open-source Ice or the paid Bartender, which collects the icons in a menu you open when you need it.
A lower display resolution, which makes everything larger and fits fewer icons. The first two are better: this one makes everything else worse.

If you really want to hide it

Physically you cannot: it is a cutout in the panel, not a piece of software. What you can do is make it invisible, and the simplest way costs nothing: a dark wallpaper. The menu bar takes its colour from the wallpaper, and against a dark bar the cutout blends in and vanishes from sight.

There are also apps that draw a black band along the whole top edge to get the same effect in every condition. They work, but they take back the space the notch gave you: you are giving up a strip of screen so as not to see a cutout.

Or give it a job

The other way is the opposite one: instead of hiding it, use it. The notch is the only piece of screen that is always visible and always empty, and there are apps that open a panel from it with music controls, a place to park files, clipboard history, your next calendar event.

We compared ten of them, including the free ones, in Mac notch apps compared. And if you came here looking for the iPhone’s Dynamic Island, the honest answer, with the technical reason, is in Dynamic Island on Mac: can you really get it?

Three things worth knowing first

No app draws inside the cutout. On a MacBook with a notch that area is an absence of screen. The apps open a window tucked under it, drawn to match its measurements: at rest it blends in, open it drops down.
They work without a notch too. On an iMac or an external display they draw a shape of the same proportions at the top edge and behave the same way.
Ask for a measured battery cost. An always-on app animating something over a blurred panel can cost real battery. Ask for a number, not a reassurance.

Compare notch apps See ours

More guides: Dynamic Island on Mac · YouTube picture in picture on Mac · Clipboard history that skips passwords. All names are trademarks of their owners.