I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out 25 years ago)? I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS but this is absurd.
I struggled with disappearing icons (like our company VPN client - which wasn't tailscale by the way) thinking the app was somehow "stuck". I would go kill the app, restart machine etc - during restart it would get fixed "automatically" by being an app earlier in the order!
Took me months to figure out it was running afterall and just hidden by the notch.
How hard is for apple to move the "least used icons" to a fold? (but still accessible)
I would love to get a Windows-like overlay which collects all those damn menu icons.
The least Apple should do is giving developers proper APIs to build that, but instead Tahoe broke so many menu bar managers it's not funny anymore. Ice, Sanebar, Bartender,... none of them work reliably.
> If the programs you’re using refuse to let you remove those icons (or they keep re-adding them against your wishes) then those programs are bad citizens and you should probably stop using them!
I always love these types of arguments. Program does one thing bad so stop getting value of out it. lol.
Especially bad for people with poor eyesight who have to use the display scaling set toward "Large Text" instead of "Default" or "More Space"
Between the larger display scaling, losing space to the notch, and the IT department setting up new computers with 8 little pieces of preinstalled bullshit up there, Apple's perspective on this seems to be "if the Ivanti VPN menu extra disappears I guess you didn't really need that anyway!"
Having the sound, bluetooth, wifi, and other system stuff removed from the bar and accessible in control center helps, but is not sufficient.
They're too busy solving important problems like "how can I use part of my screen as a videoconferencing light source" and chasing yearly iOS new feature parity to deal with pesky things like menu extras. It's only been 25 years since OS X came out.
My visual acuity at distance has not changed from when I was 20. My ability to read tiny, poorly-contrasted text at phone distance has.
Enlarging text size is a massive benefit to everyone as we age. It’s one of the reasons that older readers were among the first to adopt e-ink readers and tablets: every book suddenly becomes a large-print book. In the world of accessibility this is one of the easiest things to do with one of the largest impacts. Not everyone is blind, not everyone is hard of hearing, but everyone gets presbyopia if they live long enough.
>the IT department setting up new computers with 8 little pieces of preinstalled bullshit up there
You can usually toggle hide on the pre installed bullshit at least. It would be helpful if there was a notification or prompt to tell you the menu bar was full so you know to do that.
My workaround was to restore pre-notch behaviour by picking a resolution from the "show all resolutions" list that is conveniently+ exactly screen res height minus notch height.
I theoretically "lose" that much height but gain a) zero notch b) non-rounded top corners and c) a traditionally heighted menubar instead of the giant one that is so big only to cater for the notch.
+ I thought this was thanks to BetterDisplay but it turns out no third party tool is needed and it's all first party probably because someone at Apple is as annoyed by the notch as I was and so that's their solution.
I think it is because they want to send to apps resolution list that includes or excludes the notch area to choose from for full screen modes (eg in games). Selecting "show all resolutions" basically shows this list.
Hasn't menu bar applets crowding with no official overflow menu been a problem with MacOS with an obvious solution (add an overflow menu) for... 2+ decades now? I know third party solutions exist and it's kind of an edge case, but still, I remember encountering this back in the day on my ancient plastic Macbook.
It's much worse than it used to be. Before it was only really a problem with apps with a lot of menus, and you could access the items by switching to an app with fewer of them. Now, the notch takes up a lot of space, and you hit it really soon on a 14" display—I can only have maybe three third party menu applets on top of my collection of built-in ones before they disappear into the notch.
I think it's not just the notch, but that menu bar icons are more widely spaced than they used to be. I want to say it happened around Sonoma (10.14)? I was working on a Mac app at the time. Icon styles went from dense with a generally square clickable area to widely spaced, wide rectangular clickable area, and a highlight with rounded corners when clicked.
I have a 16 inch and even I moved to the “no notch” resolution last year because a ton of apps don’t let you choose whether to have a menu icon, and many of them are required corporate crapware. Apple should have bought Bartender and made it part of the OS 10 years ago, or at least before shipping this stupid notch. Apple’s “we know what you need better than you do” approach is so exhausting.
they kindamostly cared when it was OS X. everything's been a bit of a mess since it became macOS while trying to make a unified platform for all their hardware
Did you ever think it was good? Aside from the tight integration with other Apple products enabling extra features, I never liked it better than Android. Switched for work, not really a choice. Still use “DROID!” from the OG Moto Droid as my text tone.
Yeah, it was pretty good, even without the "tight integration." The most important integration I can think of is answering texts on my computer. This is a huge win. And it does suck that Android still lacks a central syncing facility like iCloud.
I do think we benefit from competition. I also have a Moto Droid and it was OK, but there was some janky UI. And the noises... talk about infuriating. The phone was always making noises with no indication as to WTF was making them or what they meant.
I run into it when using Rider. I have text size increased on my Macbook and Rider has 8000 menu items, so my menu icons (all of which are default macOS, no third-party stuff) will be hidden to make room for Rider's stuff. I have to switch over to another workspace or window (i.e. away from Rider) if I want to access one of them. It's annoying but I'm not sure who I blame here; Rider I guess, for having a zillion menu items.
Why not blame Apple for having a busted-ass menu bar design? The behavior of "if the menu is busy, icons just disappear" and advice like "apps shouldn't rely on menu bar icons" are just bad ideas. They don't work well with how people use computers or how developers write apps. It's a bad design.
I prefer to blame Rider because it's the only app where I encounter this problem, and it seems more like a "don't make your list of menu entries so long it spans the notch and pokes into the menu icons" error than anything else to me. Simple as.
Unfortunately for me, notch overflow happens to me in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, VSCode, Outlook, Excel (and Word and probably all of the other Microsoft Office apps), LibreOffice, IINA (mpv frontend), CotEditor, IDEA, and QtCreator, just among those installed on my work machine.
> Simple as.
Neither Apple nor app developers control either what font sizes a user needs or how many apps they're running which produce menu bar icons. In that context, "not so long that it [...] pokes into the menu icons" isn't even well-defined. It's literally meaningless unless you parameterize it according to factors like those, which is not "simple as" anything.
It's a computer screen, not a page in some particular print magazine.
> it seems more like a "don't make your list of menu entries so long it spans the notch and pokes into the menu icons"
Only counting menu bar items that either (a) come with the operating system or (b) are imposed on me by applications that my employer forces me to run for compliance or other purposes, there are eleven mandatory icons in my menu bar at all times. So it doesn't matter whether the app in focus has few menu items or many; I run into this issue regardless.
> I prefer to blame Rider
There are a few ways to make sense of the situation, but none of them look great for Apple tbh.
If the menu bar is well designed but it doesn't work well with increased display scaling, accessibility is a second-class (or worse) concern in Apple's design.
If the menu bar is well designed but it doesn't work well when there are dozen menu bar icons, then it isn't suitable for environments where users don't control the number of menu bar icons they have to deal with— this, of course, is many professional environments.
So either: macOS isn't genuinely intended to be accessible, macOS isn't a general-purpose operating system for professionals, the menu bar has a bad design, or some combination of all three.
Of the three, "the menu bar's design is bad" seems the simplest and least absurd.
If you're visually impaired, you can hit it even with just a few icons on a 14" laptop. Fonts anything other than tiny + overloaded menus + even a handful of app icons means I always hit this unless I'm docked.
Hacky menu bar modification tools are basically an accessibility requirement for me, and my vision isn't even that bad. (Best corrected is 20/30 or 20/40 or so.) People with serious impairments are totally screwed by this on macOS, sometimes even with large external monitors.
Just take Ice's source and have Claude whip you up the features you want. Keep it to yourself. Takes an afternoon and doesn't have other people calling you a sloplogist.
I think they've cleaned it up since then [1], but in the age of supply chain attacks, very concerning. Personally, even as a paying user of Bartender, I moved to the open source solution, at least I can watch the github for changes.
With some apps, I can't remember if tailscale is one I don't think so but another vpn we use is, it's even worse because opening them only creates the menubar icon. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out why the vpn wouldn't start before I realised it was just hidden. No feedback at all
I use an app called BarBee for this. I heard great things about bartender as well. There are a few other decent options. But, yeah, the bottom line is, it's kind of crazy how Apple did not think about this, about the overcrowding of the menu bar and implement an auto-collapse mechanism or something like that.
The true short-sightedness Apple has had becomes really obvious in the latest liquid glass UI, whatever the fuck that is called. It's a grand fuck to a decent-looking UI that existed before that.
Not true. XP had a feature to set each icon to always show, “automatically,” or never. Will send you screenshots if you demand them, when I get home to my XP ThinkPad.
To be clear: this is not really new with the notch. It's been menu bar icon behavior for decades where if there isn't enough space for all the menus plus menu icons, menu icons disappear with no way to get to them. The notch just acts like the last menu item now (albeit even if there's space between the last menu item and the notch, for applications without a ton of menus).
And yes, it's completely bizarre that macOS doesn't provide an overflow menu. Instead, again yes for decades, you've had to buy/use something like Bartender for this. It is utterly bizarre and inexplicable.
With Tahoe, Apple has finally provided a half-solution, which is that in System Settings you can entirely hide select running menubar utilities to regain some space. But of course that's only helpful for utilities you never need to look at or click.
tl;dr: yes this is utterly absurd but it's been absurd for decades. It's nothing to do with recent versions of macOS.
Yes, it's terrible and something even Windows handles better. It's one of those utterly bizarre Apple things which make me wonder which old product guy has dirt on everyone else at the company.
