On my 13” Intel MacBook Pro, the icons reached to about halfway across the screen. On the 14” M3 MacBook Pro, ironically a machine with a larger display, at least 3 icons get hidden.
This “design” (or lack thereof) is so dumb. It is utterly ridiculous to me that this is still how it “works” two years after the introduction of the redesigned MacBook Pro with a notch. How hard could it be to add an overflow menu with a “«” (or should it be “»”?) button that shows the remaining apps and icons that can’t be displayed? This entire situation with the notch is ironic, because the iPhone notch and “dynamic island” are so thoughtfully designed with zero compromises regarding the functionality of iOS. In fact, they actually provide a better user experience. Yet on the Mac, how the notch interacts with macOS is laughably incompetent. It is shockingly lazy regarding attention to detail, and results in an outright disruptive and confusing user experience.
Here’s my current menubar:
I try to keep my less frequently used icons (like Hookmark) on the left because I mostly invoke them from the keyboard anyway. But I hate when Docker gets stuck behind the notch, and I have to quit other apps on the right to get Docker back to the screen.
Apple should do something about this behavior because it’s really annoying. And no, I’m not going to install a 3rd-party app to fix these issues, even if I love its icon.
I’m still using my 2017 iMac 27-inch, so at native resolution the menu bar doesn’t take up too much space. However, for a while I had the display scaled to a lower resolution, and with certain apps with lots of menus the menu bar gets filled almost to bursting! I’ve hidden some menu items where possible, and switched to the analogue clock to free up more space, but I suspect I’d have trouble if I move to a new Mac with the notch in the display. I feel that this may go down in history as one of Apple’s most bone-headed design decisions ever, and because because of an irrational hatred of bezels…
Oh, I actually like the analog clock idea. And since clicking on it will open Notification Center, it makes sense to add the calendar and clock widgets on the top.
https://static.decoding.io/media/share/Screenshot%202023-12-09%20at%2011.10.54.png
Thanks!
Follow-up post: Checking the time on my Mac