[alin23]

The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??"

No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket.

I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app.

Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe.

This could have been handled better.

[cosmic_cheese]

The reason things are this way is that in Apple’s view, third party devs are effectively misusing menu items.

Originally it wasn’t even possible for third parties to add new menu extras using public APIs. That was something reserved for Apple. Third party devs had to use a tool called MenuCracker.

When Apple finally added the API used now, the intention for it was for full fat GUI programs to provide ephemeral menu item companions that disappear when the host app is quit. It was never intended to facilitate persistent third party menu extras.

So the issue hasn’t been fixed because in Apple’s view it’s a problem of third party devs’ own creation. If all third party menu items were ephemeral nobody would have enough for them to overflow into the notch area.

——

Personally I think they should offer a way to extend the Control Center and push devs who want persistence towards that. That would afford better organization for users and allow them to better control which are immediately visible (since some apps don’t offer an option to hide their menu item).

[sysworld]

It's also abused by soo many devs, just wanting there app to be seen 24/7 by the users, regardless if there app gains anything from being in the menu bar. That's why many users run out of space. Most people don't look at settings or ways to remove them (if they even give an option), so they quickly fill up the menu bar. Back in the day without a notch, people would have so many that some menu items would disappear too.

[bayindirh]

A couple of my colleagues have so many applications running at the menu bar, so they have to use Bartender to be able to have anything resembling a functional menu bar.

I understand power users, but I don't understand these users.

[deathanatos]

… on my MBP, if we discount the icons that ship with macOS, the limit is 4 items. Past that, they're hidden by the notch.

I don't get why an overflow arrow once the limit is reached is so hard here.

Or letting users decide what the order of items in the bar should be.

[m-s-y]

command-click-and-drag them to where you want 'em. don't need bartender for this

[Angostura]

Weird. I think I have about 4.

Someone is confusing the menu bar for the Dock

[tass]

Try a corporate laptop. Every stupid thing you don’t need except to know it’s running is there, but you don’t know it’s running because they may just be hidden.

Jamf, zscaler, virus checkers, etc. need to all go to hell with this crap. I’m glad Tailscale are removing theirs.

[ehutch79]

Your experience is not everyone s experience. Are you one of their colleagues. No? Then they weren’t talking about you.

[bayindirh]

They don't have to be one of my colleagues to share their own perspective and experience. We're a rather large band of computer using people here, and it's good to share experiences and viewpoints.

[bayindirh]

Currently I have 6 extras, which is a rare number I see. My normal number is 3.

[saagarjha]

I am so glad that macOS Tahoe just lets me banish those apps to the shadow realm

[bayindirh]

I believe being able to remove these icons were possible since Leopard/Snow Leopard days.

[saagarjha]

Not the ones from apps

[bayindirh]

You might be right. It was long ago, and I was a Mac OS X newbie back then.

[kstrauser]

I do love that change. I’d deleted Bartender when it sold out, and now I’m glad that I don’t need or miss it at all.

[kemayo]

> Personally I think they should offer a way to extend the Control Center and push devs who want persistence towards that.

They actually added that in macOS 26. Just like on iOS, apps can now offer custom actions that you can add into the control center.

[cosmic_cheese]

I haven’t looked into it, but does it allow arbitrary UI? It sounds like they’re just buttons that trigger a single action, which isn’t sufficient for replacing menu items.

[VerifiedReports]

That's not really defensible as an excuse, especially considering Apple's grooming of users to believe that they never need to quit applications.

All Apple had to do was add a "more" indicator at the end of the area, at the very least. Or... to give all applications' entries equal footing, collapse them all into a disclosure control once there are too many to show.

But no... once again, a simple and fair solution eludes Apple's "designers."

[osicjwjxiwu]

If the “simple and fair solution” makes it so lazy developers lose money over putting things in the menu bar where they most definitely should not be putting anything, then so be it.

Stop putting things in the menu bar. End of.

[cosmic_cheese]

Yes, the number of apps that actually deserve space up there is rather small. The last thing Apple should do is enable a Windows tray style free for all.

[VerifiedReports]

I don't disagree.

[dieulot]

There’s no statement or action (such as banning menu-bar-only apps from the Store or even changing the APIs) supporting that Apple still wants menu bar items to be ephemeral.

[cosmic_cheese]

If they wanted to enable persistent third party menu extras they’d open up the same APIs that Apple themselves use.

[apple4ever]

They basically did.

[mort96]

It's such a simple problem to solve too: when there are too many menu bar icons, put them in an overflow menu. A single icon which contains a list of icons. And let me arrange which icons go into the top bar and which go into the overflow menu.

Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard.

But nooo, macOS just silently hides applications from you, with no visible indication that there's anything hidden.

[zamadatix]

Even if they didn't want to have an overflow menu for some reason there it boggles my mind why the menu bar isn't just aware of what portion is covered and should be skipped (file menus or icons) in the first place!

[butlike]

Well there's effectively no space on the lefthand side of the notch. You must assume that side is going to be completely consumed by actual menu items.

Side note: If you want to check what icons might be buried by the notch, you can Cmd + Drag any icon from the menu bar to rearrange them. If you drag an icon through the notch, the other items will pop into view, if any are hidden.

[hombre_fatal]

The same problem exists on the left side of the notch, too.

File, Edit, View, History, Window, Help

Where there are too many items, it gets silently truncated. A simple dropdown icon on overflow is such obvious UI here.

[abustamam]

One of the first things I tasked to do as a junior web developer at my first job was to make a horizontal nav menu that was responsive such that when the screen shrinks any overflow items go into a drop-down.

Baffling that a trillion dollar company can't do this.

Edit: apparently i don't know the difference between vertical and horizontal :)

[dpacmittal]

An even simpler solution is allow horizontal scrolling in the area.

[emsixteen]

That's a much worse interaction.

[manmal]

Compared to flaky bartender, I‘d prefer even that tbh.

[bigfudge]

That would be gross. I wish devs didn’t abuse menu bars (looking at teams, zoom etc)

[veidr]

It's true this is a mess, but no application should have a menu by icon as its only means of access. It's OK to offer that as an option, but all applications should be capable of presenting a user interface when launched from the Applications directory (or (rarely) ~/Applications, etc).

There's really no exception to this rule. For an (tiny) minority of applications, it makes sense to hide the dock icon, and to typically access the app via hotkey or menu bar widget. But those apps should still have an icon and should still be able to be invoked by opening it using any of the standard ways to do that. That's just how the Mac works.

[jwr]

I never understood the logic behind the thinking there. Why would you ever want to place menubar items UNDER the notch, if you know it's there and they won't be visible?

It's such an easy problem to fix, with such incredible usability consequences, I just don't get the thinking.

[butlike]

The notch itself is probably considered temporary internally. If you code a rule for the notch, then you're going to have to consider which hardware OSX is running on in order to determine if the notch is present or not for your "notch width calculation."

[leptoniscool]

"Think Different"

[VerifiedReports]

"Courage"

[Etheryte]

The truth is most apps have no business having a menubar icon, but many of them cannot even be disabled out of the box. There's a number of third-party tools that help with the issue, but really this should be handled at the OS level. I want a permission similar to notifications to control whether an app can litter the menubar or not.

[VerifiedReports]

One thing's for sure: No application should be allowed to have a menubar item without a ToolTip. WTF, that should have been obvious from day one.

At the moment, I have 11 of them on my system (not counting the clock), a mix of third-party and Apple ones. NOT ONE of them has a ToolTip.

Even worse, if you click on them, the resulting menu does not show the name of the owning application. This too should be forced. For example, I unfortunately have to run Microsoft Teams, and its toolbar menu gives you no indication of what application it belongs to.

[kstrauser]

It is in Tahoe, which is on the short list of things I strongly, genuinely like about the update.

[Etheryte]

Thank you! I did not know about this change, even though I already am on Tahoe. Much appreciated.

[kstrauser]

You’re welcome! I stumbled across that myself. It wasn’t exactly a premier feature, yet still one of my favorites.

[abustamam]

I'm curious if people even cared about the half-centimeter extra screen space they got when Apple introduced the notch into MacBooks. Arguably it makes a bigger difference in iPhones so I'll grant them that, even if it does hide half of the top bar of the iPhone. But did people hate the half centimeter bezel on macs that much that they wanted to lose an inch of their task bar? Genuinely curious how we got here!

[VerifiedReports]

The pissing and moaning about "bezels" is cacophonous in certain echo chambers.

It's sad to see Apple taking cues from a minority group of infantile users, but that's one way we got here.

[abustamam]

I mean, I don't love large bezels, but I dislike less screen real estate even more. Are the bezel nerds happy with where are now??

My android phone (OnePlus 11) has a hole punch front camera so I don't lose too much screen real estate. It's annoying sometimes but I prefer it to my mom's iPhone's giant notch.

[osicjwjxiwu]

The hole punch design absolutely horrendous. It makes everything uneven visually speaking and it just looks like - screen defect. The notch is fine, not perfect, but fine, and leagues above that stupidity of the hole punch.

[abustamam]

Well I guess Apple and Android both found their target markets in both of us!

[bredren]

This is not an unknown issue at the fruit co.

Can anyone speculate on any rational if not good reasons for not solving this problem yet?

[kccqzy]

I don’t work at the fruit co but since you asked for speculations. Mine: the fruit co designers are still designing a nice interface to show the overflow, because they obviously think that the Windows tray overflow looked inelegant and are still searching for the ideal UI. But the designers themselves don’t have a lot of menu bar apps so they don’t think it’s a priority.

[tmd83]

Or perhaps the teams at fruit co found a way to claim that their overflow is an innovative new feature and not copied from some other designs.

While they do a ton of good work, they do love to claim everything was first invented by them.

[toraway]

Probably the same response I just saw someone reply with in this very thread:

"You shouldn't have so many utilities running"

It's the go-to Apple user response to anything the OS doesn't support or does poorly: "Why would you want to do that?"

[emj]

Windows has always baffled me with the system tray icons it is too cluttered. I grew up with a tricked out Linux desktop so I understand the need to customize. But most of the time you do not need that.

I believe a VPN should stay hidden if it works, no need to have it visible.

[paranoidrobot]

> I believe a VPN should stay hidden if it works, no need to have it visible.

Which is fine if you only have one VPN client or one VPN network and you don't need to turn it on/off or change it regularly.

My current day job has one VPN client but five different networks.

At a previous job I had two different clients I would need to switch on and off.

It is very on-brand with Apple though that there is one right way to do things, and everyone else either needs to change the way they do things or go elsewhere.

[VerifiedReports]

I disagree with this one. If a VPN is important, I want to see that it is still connected and hasn't crashed.

[biztos]

That’s the company response but I’m definitely not the only long-term Apple user whose go-to response is a sympathetic nod followed by a long rant about Tim Cook and his contempt for software engineering.

[edelhans]

Considering that I need a good dozen utility apps to override absolutely bonkers macOS design descicions there is no way around that.

[oneeyedpigeon]

TBF, there isn't a computer on earth that will solve that problem perfectly. At some point, "you shouldn't have so many utilities running" is perfectly acceptable advice.

[VerifiedReports]

No, because their icons can simply be collapsed into a disclosure control.

[oneeyedpigeon]

"You'll run out of memory eventually" was my point.

[VerifiedReports]

That's the standard apologist response to ANY defect you point out in anything, or any question they don't know the answer to but still want to bloviate about.

See: Stack Overflow

[manmal]

The upcoming MacBook Pro (late this year) is rumored to have a hole-punch camera: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/24/touchscreen-macbook-pro...

It‘s reasonable to assume that menu bar items will be rendered differently as well, to accommodate for Dynamic Island (which changes its width as needed).

[veidr]

Well I mean, recently because they have no idea how to make good UIs, and have not read their own enormously detailed (and excellent) Human Interface Guidelines tomes from 10, 20, and probably 30 years go, and have basically regressed to barbarism.

But before that relatively recent fall-off-a-cliff event (whatever it was that caused it, most of us will never know), it was pretty clear that they didn't want to implicitly endorse the lazy/anti-user/Windows-equivalent-UX antipattern of having apps that intentionally made themselves accessible only from a menu bar icon.

I hate the App Store shite that goes wildly too far the other way, but I don't quite understand wwhy they couldn't figure out a way to enable the menu bar widget API in a way that failed if your app didn't also have a way to open via all the normal ways (double-clicking the icon in /Applications, asking Siri to launch it, etc)

[xnyan]

> they didn't want to implicitly endorse the lazy/anti-user/Windows-equivalent-UX antipattern of having apps that intentionally made themselves accessible only from a menu bar icon.

The single biggest complaint I had when I switched it to Mac was lack of this feature. Still miss it. .

[kevincox]

> and have not read their own enormously detailed (and excellent) Human Interface Guidelines tomes

This seems to also apply to all new UIs produced by apple in the last 5 years.

[fainpul]

They think you're holding it wrong.

[amjd]

Ice is an open source app solves this problem through an overflow menu:

https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice

[FireBeyond]

Ice is no longer actively maintained. You might want to look at Thaw.

[apple4ever]

Agreed. I hate the notch. I run "Just Say No to Notch" from the App Store to avoid the problem entirely.

[dsalzman]

I’ve been looking for something like your brothers app. Used to use an app called helium for floating video windows. I’ll check it out!

[cevn]

Once you find out that the notch can hide app items it makes you want to throw your computer out of a window.

[alsetmusic]

It's annoying for end-users (and you), but why not display a window with a SUPERSHORT message explaining that MacBooks with a notch might hide the icon on the first launch? Have a button or link to explain more for people who want it.

Shouldn't have to, but it might mitigate some of the stuff a FAQ won't catch.

[emj]

I forgot such messages directly. Then when It realize I saw an important message tens seconds ago I have no way of going back. I can not press undo and get that message again.

Error messages are a bad design. Error logs are ok. Global undo would be king like the undo close tab feature in browsers.

[carlosjobim]

There is no reason for apps to be in the menubar. Either they should have a dock icon or be hidden completely. And open a window with functions and settings when opened by spotlight.

[quietsegfault]

Perhaps people who have many menubar icons are hare-brained and you should check to see how many icons they’ve got before you price your product for them to account for the support overhead.

[freehorse]

Of course you are gonna get more complains from people who struggle more with technology, this does not mean these are the only ones with menu bar icons hidden behind the notch.

[hu3]

Ahh yes, blame the clients for a broken OS that should "just work".