How to Hide the MacBook Notch (And Why You Might Not)

What “hiding” the notch actually means

The physical facts decide what any notch hider can do. The notch is a hole in the display panel. Behind it sit a 1080p camera, an ambient light sensor and the camera indicator LED, and nothing else: no Face ID, as the breakdown of what lives inside the notch covers in detail. No app can remove a hole in glass. Software can do exactly two things: make the strip around the cutout black so it visually disappears, or stop drawing anything in that strip so your desktop ends below it.

One more fact before choosing a method: the strip the notch sits in is bonus space. On the 16-inch MacBook Pro the panel is 1800×1169 points, while the classic 16:10 workspace would be 1800×1125. The menu bar moved up into those extra 44 rows, and the notch lives there with it. That framing matters for every technique below.

Method 1: paint the menu bar black

This is how TopNotch and similar utilities work, and the trick is simpler than most people assume. They never touch your display settings. They take your wallpaper, composite a pure black band across the top at the menu bar's height, and set the result as the wallpaper for each Space. Because the macOS menu bar is translucent and tinted by whatever sits behind it, the bar renders essentially solid black, and the cutout melts into it. From normal viewing distance the top of your screen reads as a clean bezel.

What it costs: nothing measurable. Resolution unchanged, zero rows lost, no meaningful performance overhead. What changes: your menu bar stays dark whether you run light or dark mode, and if you rotate wallpapers, the utility has to reprocess each new image.

You do not strictly need an app for this. Any wallpaper that is dark across its top edge does most of the job on its own, which is why many people never notice their notch at all. A utility just guarantees a perfect black every time.

Method 2: a scaled resolution that letterboxes below the camera

If the cutout bothers you even as a black band, macOS can move the entire desktop below it. Open System Settings, go to Displays, and among the scaled options are modes that fit everything under the camera housing. Pick one and the desktop drops back to the classic 16:10 frame, menu bar included. The notch now overlooks unlit pixels; the panel simply does not drive that strip anymore.

This is the only method that makes the notch genuinely invisible in every situation, and it is priced accordingly: the bonus rows get handed back. The menu bar moves down into rows your windows used to own, so your effective workspace shrinks by the height of a menu bar. The exact figures per model are in the measured notch dimensions post, but the headline is simple.

This is the method most “remove the MacBook notch” searches are really asking for, and it works. It just costs real screen; if the black band satisfies you, it is strictly the better deal.

Method 3: the per-app checkbox for stubborn fullscreen apps

Some apps misbehave around the cutout: a game whose fullscreen UI collides with the camera housing, or an older tool whose menus crowd the notch. For those, macOS ships a targeted fix that most people never find because it hides in Finder:

1. Quit the app.
2. Open the Applications folder and select the app's icon.
3. Press Cmd-I (or choose Get Info from the File menu).
4. Check “Scale to fit below built-in camera.”
5. Relaunch the app.

That one app now renders letterboxed below the camera, with its whole interface scaled slightly smaller to fit the reduced frame. Everything else on the system stays exactly where it was. The checkbox appears only on notched MacBooks, and unchecking it reverts the app on its next launch.

This is the right tool for one badly behaved fullscreen app. It is the wrong tool for hiding the notch globally, because you would be shrinking apps one by one for a problem the black band solves in a single step.

Which method to pick

Row figures come from the same NSScreen measurements as the dimensions post; the Air letterbox loss is proportionally similar at its own scaling.

The short version: if the cutout is a cosmetic annoyance, use the black band and keep every pixel. If you genuinely cannot stand knowing it is there, letterbox and accept the smaller desktop. If exactly one app misbehaves in fullscreen, use its Get Info checkbox and leave the rest of the system alone.

The case for keeping it

Now the counter-argument, with my bias on the table: I build NotchBay, an app that lives in the notch, so weigh what follows accordingly.

Once you paint the band black, that strip becomes dead pixels you carry around forever. And it happens to be the most unusual pixel real estate on the machine: always visible, never covered by a window, dead center of your eyeline. That is precisely the job Apple gives the iPhone's Dynamic Island, ambient status that does not steal focus.

Putting the strip to work looks like this: now playing with a live waveform, meeting controls while Zoom or Google Meet runs, your next calendar event with a join button, AirPods battery when they connect, timers, camera and mic privacy indicators, download progress. Below the notch, a tray that catches what you copy and lets you drag it back out as files, plus dictation that runs entirely on device. That is what NotchBay does on macOS Tahoe; if you want to try the idea for free first, open-source boring.notch exists, and the honest roundup of the main notch apps compares all of them, mine included.

And if you just want the notch gone, no argument from me. The black band costs nothing, takes a minute, and reverses instantly. It is your bezel.

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