How to Hide the MacBook Notch in 2026 (and Why You Probably Shouldn't)

The MacBook Pro notch is the single most polarizing piece of industrial design Apple has shipped since the original Touch Bar. Half of users stop seeing it after a week. The other half open a fresh terminal tab, look up at that little black rectangle blocking their menu bar, and immediately Google “hide macbook notch.” If you are in the second group, this guide is for you.

We will give you the real methods to hide the notch first, no bait-and-switch. Then, at the end, we will make the case for why turning the notch into a feature is a better move than pretending it is not there.

Why the notch exists in the first place

The notch arrived with the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro redesign in October 2021 and has stayed in every Pro and Air model since. It houses the 1080p FaceTime HD camera and the ambient light sensor that drives True Tone and automatic display brightness. By moving those components into a dedicated cutout, Apple was able to push the actual display area closer to the top edge of the lid, gaining about 74 vertical pixels of menu bar space compared to a flat-bezel design.

In other words, the notch trades a small visual blemish for a larger usable display. Whether that trade was worth it depends on how much time you spend looking at the menu bar versus the rest of the screen. For more on the hardware, Apple's official MacBook Pro specs page lists the camera, sensors, and display dimensions, and the Wikipedia entry on the 2021 MacBook Pro has a good summary of the design rationale.

Method 1: macOS Display Scaling (free, built-in)

The simplest way to hide the MacBook notch is the option Apple ships in the box. macOS includes a scaled resolution that draws the desktop underneath the camera housing, leaving a thin black bar at the top where the notch used to be. The notch becomes invisible because there is no menu bar above it.

1. Open System Settings → Displays.
2. Click Advanced at the bottom right of the display preview.
3. Toggle on Show resolutions as list, then close advanced.
4. In the resolution list, pick the option labeled “Below built-in camera” or, on older macOS versions, the resolution that ends in (scaled) with no notch in the preview.

Once you switch, the menu bar slides down below the camera and the notch disappears behind a uniform black band. Fullscreen apps will also respect this and stay below the camera housing, which fixes the old problem of menu items getting eaten when an app opened in fullscreen.

Pros: free, fully reversible, official, no third-party software. Cons: you lose roughly 74 vertical pixels of usable screen, which is the entire reason the notch exists in the first place. You are essentially undoing the design trade-off.

Method 2: TopNotch (free, the popular pick)

If you do not want to give up your screen real estate, TopNotch is the most popular way to disable the MacBook notch visually. It is a free app from Lowtechguys that does one thing: it forces the menu bar background to solid black so the notch blends in seamlessly. From a normal viewing angle, the notch becomes invisible.

1. Download TopNotch from lowtechguys.com/topnotch.
2. Open the .dmg, drag TopNotch into /Applications, and launch it.
3. Grant the permissions it asks for. It only needs access to draw over the menu bar.
4. In the menu bar icon, toggle Hide notch on. Done.

TopNotch keeps the menu bar visible and at full height, so you do not lose any screen space. The trade-off is that the menu bar is locked to a single dark color, which means light-mode wallpapers no longer tint the menu bar the way they normally do.

Pros: free, zero performance impact, preserves screen real estate, reversible with one click. Cons: only works because your eyes are bad at telling pure black from very dark grey, so on a high-brightness colorful wallpaper you can still spot the notch's edges.

Method 3: NotchSpy, Forky, and Boring Notch

A small ecosystem of macbook notch hider apps has grown up around the notch since 2021. The good ones either mask it like TopNotch or turn it into something dynamic that you stop noticing because it is now carrying information.

• NotchSpy: a free utility that displays system stats inside the notch area. Once you start glancing at CPU and RAM instead of staring at the cutout, the notch stops being annoying.
• Boring Notch: open-source, Dynamic Island-style expansion that surfaces music controls and AirDrop progress when you hover. The notch becomes the trigger zone instead of dead space.
• Forky: a quirky little app that puts a tiny illustrated character in the notch. Spiritual cousin to Dockling with a different art style.

These do not technically hide the notch. They make you stop caring that it is there, which is arguably the same problem solved a better way. We cover the full list of free notch utilities in Best Free MacBook Notch Apps in 2026.

Method 4: Per-app fullscreen behavior

Some older apps render their menu bar at the wrong height when they go fullscreen on a notched MacBook, which causes menu items to vanish behind the camera housing. macOS has a per-app fix for this and you do not need any third-party software:

1. Quit the app you want to fix.
2. In Finder, navigate to /Applications and find the app icon.
3. Right-click the app icon and choose Get Info (or press ⌘I).
4. Tick the box labeled “Scale to fit below built-in camera”.
5. Re-launch the app. It will now treat the bottom of the notch as the top of the screen.

This is the right tool when only one or two specific apps are giving you trouble. You do not have to nuke your global resolution or install a utility just to fix Final Cut or an old game. For the full design rationale on how Apple expects developers to handle the notch, the Apple Human Interface Guidelines on the menu bar are surprisingly readable.

Comparison: every way to hide the MacBook notch

Why you probably should not hide the MacBook notch

We promised the methods first, and you have them. Here is the contrarian case in good faith.

When you hide the notch with display scaling, you are giving up roughly 1100 × 36 pixels of perfectly good screen space. That is a strip of menu bar wider than the entire camera housing on either side, plus the area inside the notch itself if you are willing to use it. On a 14-inch MacBook Pro that is real estate you paid Apple a four-figure premium for. Hiding it is the equivalent of buying a 27-inch monitor and gluing a piece of cardboard across the top inch.

The space on either side of the notch, the so-called ears, is fully usable by any well-written menu bar app. The space inside the notch is also usable: it is the same drawing area as the menu bar, just with a camera cutout running through the middle. A small enough sprite or icon fits cleanly between the camera and the corners.

Things you can do with the notch instead of hiding it:

1. A live Pomodoro countdown in MM:SS so you always know how long until your next break.
2. A pixel pet that walks while you focus and sleeps while you rest.
3. A music player with album art and skip controls that expand on hover, Dynamic Island style.
4. An audio level meter for podcasters and streamers so you can see your input volume without opening a separate window.
5. A clipboard history indicator that previews the last item you copied.

We covered the full catalog of these in What to Do With the MacBook Notch. The point is that the notch is only annoying when it is empty. Once something useful is living inside it, your brain reclassifies it from “defect” to “widget” and you stop seeing it as a notch at all.

The Dockling pivot: turn the notch into a pet

Dockling is the app we built precisely because we got tired of the “hide the notch” debate. It places a pixel-art pet inside the notch on any 2021-or-later MacBook Pro and ties that pet to a real Pomodoro timer. The pet walks while you focus, curls up to sleep on your break, and reacts when your session ends. It is a $2.99 one-time purchase, no subscription, no account, no cloud.

You can also generate a custom pet from a photo on the website if none of the bundled animals match the vibe of your desk. The generation runs server-side and ships the frames back as a zip you drop into the Characters folder. Details on /store/custom.

If the pet idea is too much for your taste but you still want something living in the notch, Dockling also runs as a pure menu bar Pomodoro timer with the pet hidden, see our desktop pet guide for the full spectrum.

Get Dockling for $2.99 →

FAQ

Can you actually remove the MacBook notch?

No. The notch is a physical cutout in the display panel that houses the FaceTime HD camera and the ambient light sensor, so there is no way to remove it. Every method that claims to remove the notch is really hiding it visually with software. macOS Display Scaling and TopNotch are the two cleanest ways to do that.

Does TopNotch slow my Mac down?

No. TopNotch is a tiny utility that paints the menu bar background solid black. It uses a negligible amount of CPU and memory and runs as a background launch agent. There is no measurable performance impact on Apple Silicon. See the official TopNotch page for the latest version and changelog.

Does hiding the notch affect FaceTime or the camera?

No. Every method covered here operates at the menu bar drawing layer, not at the hardware layer. The FaceTime HD camera, the ambient light sensor that controls True Tone, and the green privacy LED keep working exactly as before. macOS will still draw the camera-in-use indicator near the notch when an app accesses the camera, regardless of which notch hider you have installed.

Will Apple ever remove the MacBook notch?

Long-term, yes, almost certainly. Apple has been investing in under-display camera technology for years, and the rumor mill has pointed at a future MacBook Pro with a Face ID-style sensor system buried beneath the panel. None of that is shipping in 2026. Every MacBook Pro from the 2021 redesign onward and the redesigned MacBook Air all keep the notch.

What is the actual size of the MacBook notch in pixels?

On the 14-inch MacBook Pro the notch is roughly 230 pixels wide and 36 pixels tall. On the 16-inch model it is roughly 260 pixels wide. The space on either side, the ears, is the same height and is fully usable by menu bar apps. The space inside the notch is also drawable if your sprite is small enough to fit between the camera and the rounded corners, which is exactly how Dockling fits a pet in there.

Is there a way to hide the notch with a sticker?

People have tried. The result is that you cover the camera and the ambient light sensor, which breaks True Tone and FaceTime, and the notch is still visible because the display goes dark in that region regardless. Stickers solve the wrong problem. Stick to software.

What is the best free MacBook notch app?

For pure hiding, TopNotch. For repurposing the notch into something functional, Boring Notch is the cleanest open-source option. We ranked the full list in Best Free MacBook Notch Apps in 2026.

For more on Apple's own guidance on the camera housing, see the Apple Support article on the camera housing. For the canonical menu bar design rules every notch app obeys, the Human Interface Guidelines remain the source of truth.