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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every time I get a new Mac, I run these commands to reduce the spacing between menu bar icons. Lets you fit at least 2x the number of items in the menu bar.
This was always my biggest gripe about using a mac, the OS that "just works". I ended up a bunch of commands I had to run and a stack of apps I needed to install for it to feel usable.
When I set up a Mac I have a short list of things that I need to install. When I set up Windows I have a much longer list of things that I need to un-install. I much prefer the former.
The users who run into issues with menubar space would probably be well served to question if they really need all that stuff. The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness or weird issues... because they have 2 dozen utilities running in the background that they don't consider, which are all looking for CPU time or trying to change the default behavior of the OS in conflicting ways.
My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS. I had a similar desire with the system tray on Windows (though it was more difficult on Windows due to some hardware requiring it).
Work is the only place I have an issue, because they install a bunch of security agents that all want a spot in the menubar, even though they never need me to interact with them or know what they're doing. Those agents sitting up in the menubar tend to be the reason my system has slow downs or issues. Though the slowdowns have gone away since moving to M1. On Intel my fan used to run all the time. Now I'm just left with the weird issues they cause.
Basically the view I had twenty years ago vs the view I have now. After being a UI-extender explorer for some years, I became a system-as-delivered person. I'm now at a healthy (for me) mix. I have a bunch of icons in my menu bar and an app to keep that tidy.
I agree. My menu widgets aren't the primary cause if my computer feels slow. It's almost always a ton of browser tabs because I collect stuff to investigate later and I procrastinate removing them.
However, I also see the point of the commenter that a lot of people who have a bunch of shit in the menu bar might not be computer people who understand what they are or how they got there. In those cases, people exploring things they don't know how to remove might accumulate a lot of other crap that causes a slow system.
> The users who run into issues with menubar space would probably be well served to question if they really need all that stuff
Look, I don't even want half that stuff, but the reality is that a bunch of tools mandate by my employers, and a bunch of utilities that are needed to make modern MacOS work reliably, all live up there.
A couple of VPNs, DropBox, OrbStack/Docker, eqMac to unfuck volume control on external displays, BetterDisplays and BetterSnapTool to unfuck everything else about external displays... I'm already most of the way to the notch on a 14" macbook
I'm talking about the file manager missing features.
Wifi issues going back years and years.
Default mice settings that make me want to throw the thing out a window. Seriously, who moves their cursor that slow?
The worst window manager I've ever used.
I could go on, but it's genuinely pointless. People love their macs like people love their sports teams. No matter what, some people will always love the maple leafs.
OK. We are getting further and further away from what is actually being discussed though. This isn’t your blank slate to rant about whatever has got your goat today.
okay, i questioned whether i need all that stuff and i've landed on still wanting the same set of capabilities i currently have at the cost of what used to be a reasonable number of menu bar icons.
iStat menus (or the new open source "Stats") is a brilliant use of the menu bar, but it can take a lot of space!
Then couple ordinary services that add menu bar icons that you don't even ask for (DropBox, Docker, Adobe, etc.) and you can overflow onto the notch quite quickly.
TBF - It still does "just work," The fact that it doesn't completely fit into your (and my) preferences doesn't really change that, and if that's the standard, then everything will fall short of it.
If the icons are just hidden and you can't find them in order to use the programs you have running, that's not "just working". That's broken functionality. Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.
It will not only cut off icons but the menus for applications when they have a lot of them. There is no way to fix it except to change your scaling or connect a second monitor.
I should save this thread for every time someone tries to tell me that Windows is a horrible operating system that is a major reason to not buy a computer when I say things like "The MacBook Neo isn't that good of a deal and you can totally find a Windows laptop in the price range that's built well enough, has similar performance/battery life (or better)/trackpad, and leaves you with more RAM, storage, and I/O."
I've literally picked out laptops that are clearly better buys than the Neo/Air and people will tell me things like "well then you're stuck with Windows" or "but you'll have firmware problems" and then we have to remember that Apple has had plenty of that in their past.
How about those Nvidia GPUs that would fail inevitably in older MacBook Pros?
Or the butterfly keyboard?
Or how they can’t even make window corners that match with the Liquid Glass update?
Do you have a suggestion for a Windows laptop that’s a better buy than the MacBook Neo? I kinda want a Windows laptop (for being able to run simple games, mostly) but not sure which one
Walmart is selling a HP gaming laptop with 16GB RAM and 512 GB SSD for $699—same price as the Neo.
Keep in mind it's not Magic Mac Memory because someone will jump in and tell us that 8GB of Mac memory is clearly superior to 16GB of PC memory because Macs are able to swap and wear down your SSD in the process.
A lot of Mac enthusiasts seem to scoff at the idea that someone buying a laptop wants it to be able to play some kind of video games. Apple can make the greatest computer in the world but for many customers the fact that it can only run ~5% of games or whatever is a dealbreaker.
The Neo can play many games on some level but having 8GB of RAM plus needing to share it between the CPU and GPU is a major disadvantage.
The lack of a fan also hampers performance of the chip inside of it by something like 15-30%, rather than including one for a nominal cost to maximize performance.
It’s totally fine for the intended customer but it’s a computer for a very specific customer, more niche/specific than a customer who “just wants to play some CS:Go on the side.”
Apple could swallow their pride and partner with Steam but they’ll never willingly encourage their users to use a different App Store even if it makes the computer better.
It's fine, but it's a design decision with tradeoffs, and gamers are prepared to make different tradeoffs (bigger and noisier are ok if they deliver a big enough performance jump).
It's also a con. You get worse sustained performance. You also get a hotter device. There's a reason the base model M series MBPs consistently bench higher than the exact same chip MBAs in things like Cinebench. The fan.
This can depend on what’s on sale in your region. I also have some thoughts about buying at this price range down below.
I’ll shill a website for a YouTuber called bestlaptop.deals. It tracks sale prices and has reviews attached for the laptops, along with categories for use cases. Shopping for Macs less frequently involves big sales but with Windows laptops being patient can pay off.
I’ve seen on recent reviews indicating Windows on ARM has made really great strides, from including support for anti-cheat for many online games. Not every game works but many do without any effort.
I bring these up because the battery life is excellent and many of them are in the $500-600 range.
Yes, that’s a sponsored video, but I’m linking it to show you his commentary on the software situation.
For x86-based computers there are a couple of ways you can go:
Since you mentioned gaming, you can sacrifice some portability and go with something like a Lenovo LOQ. A previous generation unit will cost about $700 and have an RTX 4050, which is enough to beat anything Apple will sell you before you get up to Pro chips. I believe there are other OEMs that may hit that price point with an RTX 5050 which of course will be an improvement.
These systems do get good battery life when you’re in integrated graphics mode. When you’re gaming you’re going to be plugged in regardless of laptop.
Another one I’ve seen on sale lately has been the Yoga 7 14” with either the Ryzen AI 340/512GB storage or the Ryzen AI 350/1TB of storage. I think the sales aren’t as good as were a couple weeks ago. These have a 2K OLED screen, 2-in-1 and pen support, generally good overall systems. The 350 model has significantly better integrated graphics performance so I’d try to stretch for that one.
Finally, in-person I was really impressed with the Acer Aspire 14 AI for being only $530. I did wish the screen was a bit better but the rest of the system was really impressive to be hitting that price.
There was an HP OmniBook I played with in store that had a great aluminum build, though the value wasn’t quite as good. It seemed like it was designed to compete with the Air and felt to me like an Air clone in a way.
I haven’t touched on used, which is obviously an option. There are a lot of options there and I think it’s worth looking into.
I would still say, if you can, spend more than what the MacBook Neo costs. The MacBook Neo isn’t a revolutionary device that changes the game in my mind. Instead, it’s a machine that makes a lot of similar sacrifices that other cheap laptops make. It’s better if you save up and spend more if you can.
For example, you’re interested in gaming, you just missed an amazing sale on the RTX 5070Ti/32GB RAM version of the Zephyrus G14 at Best Buy. It was $500 off, so about $1800 for a really amazing machine that is basically the best thing and light gaming system on the market.
Also keep in mind as I talk about this, I’m biased against 15-16” models. I like 14”.
I’m with odo1242, where’s a $700 Windows laptop that has the Neo qualities? I like my Thinkpad - it’s currently my only Windows machine - but it was $1300 or so for the entry-level model (not going to count my add-ons).
I don’t love Windows, but I don’t hate it either. Amazing backward compatibility, and that is not to be ignored.
Yoga 7, check Best Buy, although I think the discount was bigger a few weeks ago.
It’s actually better in many ways: 2K OLED touch screen, convertible with pen support, double the RAM, backlit keyboard, ranks better on battery life for office tasks, a far wider array of ports.
If you stretch to the 1TB model you get the Ryzen 7 AI 350 which beats the Neo on integrated graphics and multi-core processor speeds. You’ll pay a little more but if you need the storage the Neo is out of contention already, and at that price your MacBook Air will come with 256GB.
I have never seen anyone with enough menu bar icons to have them hide, nor have I known anyone who ran into that problem. It’s a bug that should be fixed, but I just don’t think it’s as big of a deal as it’s made out to be.
Just because you have never personally seen a bug occur doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
This very article is about how Tailscale frequently gets reports of them being hidden.
And I personally have had the icons hidden. My work laptop has a lot of stuff running on it (much of it is mandatory: VPN, custom company processes, Google Drive, etc) and combined with my personal preferred programs (f.lux, etc) it occasionally hits the limit and goes under the notch.
This is the fairly standard Apple defensework where "it just works, but if it doesn't work it's probably not a real problem" despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
I’ve been solely mac user for the past 15+ years, and have no idea what this thread is talking about. I think, as the other person said, we make assumptions on what’s a problem for others, when in reality, it’s not a big deal.
Why does every Mac complaint thread since the beginning of time always feature the "I've never heard of this so it must not be a legitimate issue" guy?
Just because you have never hit the issue doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This particular issue will only really show up on notched devices with a small screen and a lot of status bar icons. It's highly dependent on what model mac you run on.
And for years and years when in discussions about Linux vs Mac, Linux was always slammed as having to be customized and "user's should never have to use the terminal" . (I agree with that, but even in 2014 I remember having to run terminal commands to tweak stuff to make it work more like I wanted to)
Ironically I ended up on linux. Windows went to crap, and I figured if I have to run a bunch of scripts to make my OS usable I may as well just use linux.
Honestly, I couldn't be happier. I get so much more out of my hardware and I enjoy the experience so much more.
I'd argue that for most people, the system defaults are fine. They don't have GUI controls / preferences for most of the stuff that power users and the HN crowd might need. However, they provide a path for people at those levels with CLI commands.
I think it's a fair balance. If you're running a bajillion things that add menu icons and you don't also care about computers enough to want to learn more, that's probably pretty frustrating. Most of the people I've met who care a lot about custom software have been curious about going further. Small sample size, just my two cents.
That phrase "just works" speaks more to vertical integration than it does to any more specific claim about UX, alignment to preferences, or immediate productivity, and to demonstrate how foundationally this is encoded, you implicitly alluded as much in that opening phrase "a mac, the OS" that directly conflated the hardware and the software.
Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers. Not out of any blinkered misconceptions about quality, usability, or an otiose love for Apple or their products otherwise.
> Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers
All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.
Unless you install the bare OS from scratch. Apple bundles the drivers for their hardware with their OS.
Good luck with plugging in anything non-Apple branded or not using standard USB audio or Ethernet CDC and you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts that almost certainly will break in the next OS release.
You can do this for Windows too, that's how most corporate images are built.
One image and 30 different laptop models, that's how it's done in every competently run megacorp IT department. Do you think some poor technician is manually loading drivers onto every Windows laptop?
My solution to this very problem was to virtualize an ancient OS X (was not easy) so I could continue to use a perfectly good scanner.
Though I'm certain you've raised this issue before, and it was met with "I've never heard of anyone needing a scanner, you must be doing something weird, have you tried taking a picture of it with your iPhone(R) instead?"
> All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.
If you’re lucky. One laptop I had in the past (and ultimately returned) had an issue where the vendor-provided NVIDIA drivers were the only ones that allowed its GPU to perform correctly, but were very outdated, which resulted in Windows Update continuously updating them and dragging performance back down. I even tried using the policy editor to lock the drivers in but that failed too because the drivers are split into several pieces and I’d inevitably miss some component, resulting in broken half-updated drivers.
Hmmm, is this supposed to do something on OSX 26.3? I tried setting it to 10 and it doesn't seem to do anything? Wonder if there's something new for Tahoe.
Well I suppose I can't miss out on the opportunity to plug my open-source menu bar app for voice-to-text in any app! Going on three years of development, believe it or not.
> Apple could certainly make some changes to prevent this being an issue at all.
Why Apple still hasn't fixed this in 2026 baffles me. The fact that a company the size of Tailscale has to find workarounds for an Apple blunder like this speaks volumes about how terrible Apple's software management is.
This seems like a good place to ask: What is the current state of the art for connecting back to my home network while remote? I want:
access to my home server
ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)
ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc)
ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on boot. This one is because I can't get OTA TV at home and want to set up a simple streaming box at someone else's house to do it that connects back to my house, so we can stream off all of our devices.
I'm guessing tailscale will be a part of this setup which is why I ask here.
> ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)
Should note that Tailscale does not work natively with hdhr for mpeg television streams b/c wireguard doesn't natively support udp multicast/broadcast. Also can't directly port forward b/c hdhr sets a default ttl of 2.
My understanding is that most VPNs in general don't support udp multicast due to operating on the network layer rather than data link, though iirc OpenVPN supports multicast traffic through its virtual TAP (Layer 2) rather than TUN (Layer 3).
Tailscale does create a TUN/TAP virtual network[0], though udp multicast is still not natively supported.
By 'stream US TV' I assume they just mean using popular streaming services like Netflix. If that's the case, than UDP multicast packets aren't involved at all, since it's all unicast.
Your advice would apply if they're using a local TV tuner or IPTV setup to share live TV on the local network or something, but that seems unlikely. But for content coming from mainstream Internet streaming services, it's good bet they're not using multicast.
For $5 a month you can also get a Mullvad VPN exit node. It’s billed directly through Tailscale which makes it painless.
When I’m outside the U.S. I get much better speeds through the Mullvad exit node than through my (U.S.) home exit node. I’m not sure why, since my home internet is gigabit fiber and I confirmed that I had a direct connection (no DERP relay).
Yes, you've described Tailscale + Exit Nodes + Tailnet that you invite your family to. Install Tailscale and enable some devices as exit nodes - it's pretty much as simple as that.
I would phrase that as what Tailscale does that is more convenient than wg. If you “barely know what a subnet is” go for it. wg is easy as pie though, and just don’t maintain 90 tunnels… You don’t need a full mesh. An extra hop or two, especially within a lan, won’t hurt.
I would recommend WireGuard as well, I primarily use it with Tailscale as backup. WG is straightforward to set up, and with LLM the knowledge gap is now nothing if you have trouble with it
I'm using tailscale for this and am finding it great. I have an Unraid home server/NAS, which has quite nice tailscale integration. The server can be used as an exit node, and each containerized application/workload can be configured to use tailscale and get a nice (https) address that works in your tailnet. I'm not close to hitting the free tier limits, though I'd be happy to pay for it (and I do pay for mullvad through them)
Tailscale is probably what you want, but if you care about privacy you'll have to be sure to disable the telemetry/logging/spying option on each of your nodes.
By default it will leak your so-called “private” network behavior to Tailscale (connections on what port, from what node, to what node, opened when, closed when): https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging
Related question: how are people handling adding family members of varying technical abilities to your tailnets? Does each family member get a separate user so you can manage their access? For my immediate family I was just logging tailscale in as me on their devices, but that becomes a pain when they get logged out and need me to log in again before things go back to working.
if you are behind cgnat (both ipv4, ipv6) then vps, have public ipv6 then you can connect via public domain (ddns openwrt) and if you have a public ip, wireguard it is
I found good success with OpenWRT/Tomato and WireGuard.
The interface is bad when it comes to provisioning but it can be done with a QR code and once it works the native experience of turning on the VPN was just stunningly fast. In this day and age you expect things to be slow with negotiation and various unreliable steps but it was just amazing that I tap the VPN button on iOS and it's connected in a fraction of a second.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I stumbled across TailScale while I asked ClaudeAI regarding switching off of VPN: I wasnt aware of the tool.
Im "shocked" how perfect it functions! It worked out of the box for a fairly simple but old windows setup where I could apply it: Everything was perfectly fine, super user friendly in the beginning.
Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer
> Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer
I do exactly this! I keep Tailscale running my family's shared iMac, making it easy for me to remotely connect to it and screen share if necessary to help. I went a more complicated route[0] and installed Tailscale as a system background daemon that runs as root and starts up before the first user login. Which also means no GUI interface, so more protected from user error.
> We’re working on a comparable UI for Windows devices
As a Linux user and fan of good GUI apps, it always bums me out I'm stuck with the CLI-only options for apps like Tailscale. Even for a simple tray icon I have to resort to buggy GNOME extensions.
I understand the fragmented ecosystem and small user-base on the desktop Linux side make it hard to justify, but I hope that changes one day!
Re: buggy GNOME extensions, it drives me nuts that GNOME has no built in support for menu bar icons/app indicators.
There's a whole class of GUI apps that should run in the background until needed, and GNOME just has no solution here. I really don't get why they removed this functionality.
I don't want a "service" model where you start/stop gui apps via systemd. And I don't want to keep a window around for no good reason.
It wasn't actually! I've been using a third party extension that tries to provide a similar tray icon (after moving from a different extension that doesn't support my version of GNOME) but it's really flaky. I'll try this. Thanks for the tip.
Apple should let users double the menu bar height. Put the app menus, user name, current time and search along the bottom. A text only bar would look coherent.
Then put menu bar items on the row above. Default from right, but let users move items to the left.
I use hiding menu bar and dock. Dynamic Wallpaper toggles desktop files/widgets visibility. So my Mac's resting face is, and would remain, completely uncluttered.
Ironically, I have trouble with Tailscale and Mac SSO. I setup my tailnet with Apple SSO and when I want to connect on my non Windows device there is not an easy way to add a new user and the new user has their own tailnet. I wish I could just use tailscale with a passkey without using third party sso.
This feels like one of those bugs that sounds niche until you put a work Mac through the usual gauntlet of VPN, MDM, chat, calendar, backup, and whatever else corp IT adds. Not catastrophic, but it is kind of wild that macOS still has no first party overflow affordance for menu bar icons.
Isn't it true that Apple just prefers apps not use the menu bar in the first place? I'm not sure where I had read that, but it might explain why Apple doesn't improve the menu bar. Personally I'm of the opinion that they should improve it because the current situation is untenable.
Not exactly, though many apps violate Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for macOS menu bar extras[1]:
Let people — not your app — decide whether to put your menu bar extra in the menu bar. Typically, people add a menu bar extra to the menu bar by changing a setting in an app’s settings window. To ensure discoverability, however, consider giving people the option of doing so during setup.
Avoid relying on the presence of menu bar extras. The system hides and shows menu bar extras regularly, and you can’t be sure which other menu bar extras people have chosen to display or predict the location of your menu bar extra.
Consider exposing app-specific functionality in other ways, too. For example, you can provide a Dock menu that appears when people Control-click your app’s Dock icon. People can hide or choose not to use your menu bar extra, but a Dock menu is aways available when your app is running.
Yes, it was a huge mistake to allow any random app developer to claim such a prominent and limited piece of screen real estate. But it’s been an option for so long now that everyone will scream bloody murder if they try take it away.
Apple’s opinion seems to be: running out of space happens to only a few people running tons of menu-bar-loving apps, so if you are dorky enough to run into this problem, you should be dorky enough to solve it yourself.
Back in the Mac OS X public beta days (and maybe even into 10.0–10.1?), apps that are nowadays shoved into the menu at used to live in the Dock. I kinda think I prefer that.
I love Tailscale so much and when I got added to what may have been an A/B test for the windowed app, I was even happier with it. It's a great improvement.
I always change my screen resolution to avoid the notch on my Mac. It's non-obvious how to do this but you end up with a slightly shorter resolution than the default.
I know this means I'm wasting potential pixels, and wasting all the engineer effort that went into the nearly bezel-free design, but worth it IMHO.
I’ve been using Bartender (paid) and Thaw (free) to manage my menu bar. Recently, both apps have become quite buggy. I’m not sure whether this is due to macOS or if there are better alternatives I’m not aware of.
I personally found it confusing and un-Mac-like that quitting the configuration app also now stops the Tailscale service. It was unfortunate to discover this while I was AFK.
My recommendation is to rethink it to work like apps like 1Password, Default Folder, Keyboard Maestro, Ice, etc., where I can always easily open a configuration app, but the service must be intentionally/knowingly quit via either the configuration app or the menu bar utility.
TLDR: Please separate the service from the new configuration app.
I don't see what this has to do with the notch. There's limited space in the menu bar. The overflow is hidden with or without the notch.
It is a bit weird that Apple hasn't provided a simple UI indicator that some icons are hidden. All that's needed is a dot with a tooltip that opens the settings to configure the menu icons.
It is an app that sits in the background and provides connectivity. Occasionally you need to change a setting. Absolutely nobody wants a rich windowed UI, or a menu bar widget that drops down a complex detail card.
I hope they can see this is exactly what killed desktop anti-virus: something that was supposed to be quietly doing its job in the background started getting in the users way. It needed to poke its head up and scream "hey remember me?" at the behest of some product managers or growth hackers. Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.
You're the one losing the plot. It's optional, still closes to the system tray without you explicitly docking it. It doesn't emerge at random like McAfee.
> Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.
So Apple are going to bake Tailscale into the OS? Also, read the blog. It's a response to Apple's bad user experience.
I have too many toolbar icons, so I do actually want the window to switch to so I can copy and paste IP addresses. I already keep it open so I can just command-tab to the window, and it's way better this way.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I am so glad that macOS Tahoe just lets me banish those apps to the shadow realm
I believe being able to remove these icons were possible since Leopard/Snow Leopard days.
Not the ones from apps
You might be right. It was long ago, and I was a Mac OS X newbie back then.
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.
If they wanted to enable persistent third party menu extras they’d open up the same APIs that Apple themselves use.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
An even simpler solution is allow horizontal scrolling in the area.
That's a much worse interaction.
That would be gross. I wish devs didn’t abuse menu bars (looking at teams, zoom etc)
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.
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.
"Think Different"
Ice is an open source app solves this problem through an overflow menu:
https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
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?
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.
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.
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?"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Considering that I need a good dozen utility apps to override absolutely bonkers macOS design descicions there is no way around that.
They think you're holding it wrong.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Ahh yes, blame the clients for a broken OS that should "just work".
Every time I get a new Mac, I run these commands to reduce the spacing between menu bar icons. Lets you fit at least 2x the number of items in the menu bar.
```
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2
```
This was always my biggest gripe about using a mac, the OS that "just works". I ended up a bunch of commands I had to run and a stack of apps I needed to install for it to feel usable.
When I set up a Mac I have a short list of things that I need to install. When I set up Windows I have a much longer list of things that I need to un-install. I much prefer the former.
And when I setup nixos, I have a single command which installs/configures everything.
Windows isn't the alternative if you're on hacker news, OpenBSD and linux are the alternatives.
Well said!
The users who run into issues with menubar space would probably be well served to question if they really need all that stuff. The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness or weird issues... because they have 2 dozen utilities running in the background that they don't consider, which are all looking for CPU time or trying to change the default behavior of the OS in conflicting ways.
My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS. I had a similar desire with the system tray on Windows (though it was more difficult on Windows due to some hardware requiring it).
Work is the only place I have an issue, because they install a bunch of security agents that all want a spot in the menubar, even though they never need me to interact with them or know what they're doing. Those agents sitting up in the menubar tend to be the reason my system has slow downs or issues. Though the slowdowns have gone away since moving to M1. On Intel my fan used to run all the time. Now I'm just left with the weird issues they cause.
Ah, got it, I’m holding it wrong.
> My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS.
My goal is to use the apps I want to use, and if they are exclusively menu bar apps, what can I do about that?
> The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness
The cause for system slowness on my mac are too many browser tabs eating 500 MB memory each, not a few 10 MB native Swift apps.
Basically the view I had twenty years ago vs the view I have now. After being a UI-extender explorer for some years, I became a system-as-delivered person. I'm now at a healthy (for me) mix. I have a bunch of icons in my menu bar and an app to keep that tidy.
I agree. My menu widgets aren't the primary cause if my computer feels slow. It's almost always a ton of browser tabs because I collect stuff to investigate later and I procrastinate removing them.
However, I also see the point of the commenter that a lot of people who have a bunch of shit in the menu bar might not be computer people who understand what they are or how they got there. In those cases, people exploring things they don't know how to remove might accumulate a lot of other crap that causes a slow system.
> The users who run into issues with menubar space would probably be well served to question if they really need all that stuff
Look, I don't even want half that stuff, but the reality is that a bunch of tools mandate by my employers, and a bunch of utilities that are needed to make modern MacOS work reliably, all live up there.
A couple of VPNs, DropBox, OrbStack/Docker, eqMac to unfuck volume control on external displays, BetterDisplays and BetterSnapTool to unfuck everything else about external displays... I'm already most of the way to the notch on a 14" macbook
I'm not even talking about app icons.
I'm talking about the file manager missing features.
Wifi issues going back years and years.
Default mice settings that make me want to throw the thing out a window. Seriously, who moves their cursor that slow?
The worst window manager I've ever used.
I could go on, but it's genuinely pointless. People love their macs like people love their sports teams. No matter what, some people will always love the maple leafs.
OK. We are getting further and further away from what is actually being discussed though. This isn’t your blank slate to rant about whatever has got your goat today.
okay, i questioned whether i need all that stuff and i've landed on still wanting the same set of capabilities i currently have at the cost of what used to be a reasonable number of menu bar icons.
so now what
Tame the clutter, by using another menubar app to hide the overflow.
Examples:
https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
https://www.macbartender.com/
iStat menus (or the new open source "Stats") is a brilliant use of the menu bar, but it can take a lot of space!
Then couple ordinary services that add menu bar icons that you don't even ask for (DropBox, Docker, Adobe, etc.) and you can overflow onto the notch quite quickly.
I use iStat Menus and I recently got one of those menu-bar expander utilities. It’s so good I forgot its name already!
Now I just click on the chevron whenever I need to access Tailscale or Postgres or CloudFlare or Creative Cloud Dropbox or Google Dropbox or ……
Really solved the problem for me.
You'll have to get back to us with that name!
TBF - It still does "just work," The fact that it doesn't completely fit into your (and my) preferences doesn't really change that, and if that's the standard, then everything will fall short of it.
If the icons are just hidden and you can't find them in order to use the programs you have running, that's not "just working". That's broken functionality. Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.
I vastly prefer Mac over Windows, but I think you have a good point. This is definitely one area where Microsoft found a more reasonable solution.
It will not only cut off icons but the menus for applications when they have a lot of them. There is no way to fix it except to change your scaling or connect a second monitor.
I should save this thread for every time someone tries to tell me that Windows is a horrible operating system that is a major reason to not buy a computer when I say things like "The MacBook Neo isn't that good of a deal and you can totally find a Windows laptop in the price range that's built well enough, has similar performance/battery life (or better)/trackpad, and leaves you with more RAM, storage, and I/O."
I've literally picked out laptops that are clearly better buys than the Neo/Air and people will tell me things like "well then you're stuck with Windows" or "but you'll have firmware problems" and then we have to remember that Apple has had plenty of that in their past.
How about those Nvidia GPUs that would fail inevitably in older MacBook Pros?
Or the butterfly keyboard?
Or how they can’t even make window corners that match with the Liquid Glass update?
Do you have a suggestion for a Windows laptop that’s a better buy than the MacBook Neo? I kinda want a Windows laptop (for being able to run simple games, mostly) but not sure which one
Walmart is selling a HP gaming laptop with 16GB RAM and 512 GB SSD for $699—same price as the Neo.
Keep in mind it's not Magic Mac Memory because someone will jump in and tell us that 8GB of Mac memory is clearly superior to 16GB of PC memory because Macs are able to swap and wear down your SSD in the process.
I have pointed out this stat before:
Global user base
Mac: 100 million (2024)
PC gamers: 900 million
A lot of Mac enthusiasts seem to scoff at the idea that someone buying a laptop wants it to be able to play some kind of video games. Apple can make the greatest computer in the world but for many customers the fact that it can only run ~5% of games or whatever is a dealbreaker.
The Neo can play many games on some level but having 8GB of RAM plus needing to share it between the CPU and GPU is a major disadvantage.
The lack of a fan also hampers performance of the chip inside of it by something like 15-30%, rather than including one for a nominal cost to maximize performance.
It’s totally fine for the intended customer but it’s a computer for a very specific customer, more niche/specific than a customer who “just wants to play some CS:Go on the side.”
Apple could swallow their pride and partner with Steam but they’ll never willingly encourage their users to use a different App Store even if it makes the computer better.
The ability to run without a fan is not a problem; it's a feature. Would you want a fan in your phone?
It's fine, but it's a design decision with tradeoffs, and gamers are prepared to make different tradeoffs (bigger and noisier are ok if they deliver a big enough performance jump).
It's also a con. You get worse sustained performance. You also get a hotter device. There's a reason the base model M series MBPs consistently bench higher than the exact same chip MBAs in things like Cinebench. The fan.
When he said games did you assume he meant Solitaire?
This can depend on what’s on sale in your region. I also have some thoughts about buying at this price range down below.
I’ll shill a website for a YouTuber called bestlaptop.deals. It tracks sale prices and has reviews attached for the laptops, along with categories for use cases. Shopping for Macs less frequently involves big sales but with Windows laptops being patient can pay off.
I’ve seen on recent reviews indicating Windows on ARM has made really great strides, from including support for anti-cheat for many online games. Not every game works but many do without any effort.
I bring these up because the battery life is excellent and many of them are in the $500-600 range.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=f8EbtQ7jQnQ
Yes, that’s a sponsored video, but I’m linking it to show you his commentary on the software situation.
For x86-based computers there are a couple of ways you can go:
Since you mentioned gaming, you can sacrifice some portability and go with something like a Lenovo LOQ. A previous generation unit will cost about $700 and have an RTX 4050, which is enough to beat anything Apple will sell you before you get up to Pro chips. I believe there are other OEMs that may hit that price point with an RTX 5050 which of course will be an improvement.
These systems do get good battery life when you’re in integrated graphics mode. When you’re gaming you’re going to be plugged in regardless of laptop.
Another one I’ve seen on sale lately has been the Yoga 7 14” with either the Ryzen AI 340/512GB storage or the Ryzen AI 350/1TB of storage. I think the sales aren’t as good as were a couple weeks ago. These have a 2K OLED screen, 2-in-1 and pen support, generally good overall systems. The 350 model has significantly better integrated graphics performance so I’d try to stretch for that one.
Finally, in-person I was really impressed with the Acer Aspire 14 AI for being only $530. I did wish the screen was a bit better but the rest of the system was really impressive to be hitting that price.
There was an HP OmniBook I played with in store that had a great aluminum build, though the value wasn’t quite as good. It seemed like it was designed to compete with the Air and felt to me like an Air clone in a way.
I haven’t touched on used, which is obviously an option. There are a lot of options there and I think it’s worth looking into.
I would still say, if you can, spend more than what the MacBook Neo costs. The MacBook Neo isn’t a revolutionary device that changes the game in my mind. Instead, it’s a machine that makes a lot of similar sacrifices that other cheap laptops make. It’s better if you save up and spend more if you can.
For example, you’re interested in gaming, you just missed an amazing sale on the RTX 5070Ti/32GB RAM version of the Zephyrus G14 at Best Buy. It was $500 off, so about $1800 for a really amazing machine that is basically the best thing and light gaming system on the market.
Also keep in mind as I talk about this, I’m biased against 15-16” models. I like 14”.
I’m with odo1242, where’s a $700 Windows laptop that has the Neo qualities? I like my Thinkpad - it’s currently my only Windows machine - but it was $1300 or so for the entry-level model (not going to count my add-ons).
I don’t love Windows, but I don’t hate it either. Amazing backward compatibility, and that is not to be ignored.
Yoga 7, check Best Buy, although I think the discount was bigger a few weeks ago.
It’s actually better in many ways: 2K OLED touch screen, convertible with pen support, double the RAM, backlit keyboard, ranks better on battery life for office tasks, a far wider array of ports.
If you stretch to the 1TB model you get the Ryzen 7 AI 350 which beats the Neo on integrated graphics and multi-core processor speeds. You’ll pay a little more but if you need the storage the Neo is out of contention already, and at that price your MacBook Air will come with 256GB.
I have never seen anyone with enough menu bar icons to have them hide, nor have I known anyone who ran into that problem. It’s a bug that should be fixed, but I just don’t think it’s as big of a deal as it’s made out to be.
Just because you have never personally seen a bug occur doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
This very article is about how Tailscale frequently gets reports of them being hidden.
And I personally have had the icons hidden. My work laptop has a lot of stuff running on it (much of it is mandatory: VPN, custom company processes, Google Drive, etc) and combined with my personal preferred programs (f.lux, etc) it occasionally hits the limit and goes under the notch.
Did we read the same article? It literally drove them to create a new application.
This is the fairly standard Apple defensework where "it just works, but if it doesn't work it's probably not a real problem" despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
"nor have I known anyone who ran into that problem"
Why on earth would people tell you that?
It only takes like 6 extra apps for items to start being hidden, it's really not that rare of an occurrence.
"I don't have any experience with that problem, it follows that no-one has that problem".
I’ve been solely mac user for the past 15+ years, and have no idea what this thread is talking about. I think, as the other person said, we make assumptions on what’s a problem for others, when in reality, it’s not a big deal.
Why does every Mac complaint thread since the beginning of time always feature the "I've never heard of this so it must not be a legitimate issue" guy?
Ah, but does it work when mice are using the computer, or is it only when humans are.
Are these mice the one-button species?
New research indicates proprietary software may be less toxic than scientists previously believed, in mice.
Just because you have never hit the issue doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This particular issue will only really show up on notched devices with a small screen and a lot of status bar icons. It's highly dependent on what model mac you run on.
And for years and years when in discussions about Linux vs Mac, Linux was always slammed as having to be customized and "user's should never have to use the terminal" . (I agree with that, but even in 2014 I remember having to run terminal commands to tweak stuff to make it work more like I wanted to)
Ironically I ended up on linux. Windows went to crap, and I figured if I have to run a bunch of scripts to make my OS usable I may as well just use linux.
Honestly, I couldn't be happier. I get so much more out of my hardware and I enjoy the experience so much more.
On a laptop? I’m interested but have never found sleep/wake and battery life to ever remotely approach osx and a Mac.
I just wish we could get these settings in nice plain text files so we can version control them and edit them easily.
I'd argue that for most people, the system defaults are fine. They don't have GUI controls / preferences for most of the stuff that power users and the HN crowd might need. However, they provide a path for people at those levels with CLI commands.
I think it's a fair balance. If you're running a bajillion things that add menu icons and you don't also care about computers enough to want to learn more, that's probably pretty frustrating. Most of the people I've met who care a lot about custom software have been curious about going further. Small sample size, just my two cents.
Be glad that you have options at all. They could have not put them in user defaults
That phrase "just works" speaks more to vertical integration than it does to any more specific claim about UX, alignment to preferences, or immediate productivity, and to demonstrate how foundationally this is encoded, you implicitly alluded as much in that opening phrase "a mac, the OS" that directly conflated the hardware and the software.
Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers. Not out of any blinkered misconceptions about quality, usability, or an otiose love for Apple or their products otherwise.
> Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers
All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.
Unless you install the bare OS from scratch. Apple bundles the drivers for their hardware with their OS.
Good luck with plugging in anything non-Apple branded or not using standard USB audio or Ethernet CDC and you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts that almost certainly will break in the next OS release.
You can do this for Windows too, that's how most corporate images are built.
One image and 30 different laptop models, that's how it's done in every competently run megacorp IT department. Do you think some poor technician is manually loading drivers onto every Windows laptop?
> Unless you install the bare OS from scratch
This caveat is doing enough heavy lifting for an Olympic podium.
> you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts
Apple has replaced kexts (kernel extensions) with a user-space alternative for many years now
Hence
> that almost certainly will break in the next OS release
My scanner has drivers available for download that date from 2015 with no updates since then.
My solution to this very problem was to virtualize an ancient OS X (was not easy) so I could continue to use a perfectly good scanner.
Though I'm certain you've raised this issue before, and it was met with "I've never heard of anyone needing a scanner, you must be doing something weird, have you tried taking a picture of it with your iPhone(R) instead?"
> All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.
If you’re lucky. One laptop I had in the past (and ultimately returned) had an issue where the vendor-provided NVIDIA drivers were the only ones that allowed its GPU to perform correctly, but were very outdated, which resulted in Windows Update continuously updating them and dragging performance back down. I even tried using the policy editor to lock the drivers in but that failed too because the drivers are split into several pieces and I’d inevitably miss some component, resulting in broken half-updated drivers.
You expect someone to ship you an OS personalized to your taste and preferences ?
This should clearly be editable in a GUI somewhere.
nix-darwin solves a lot of those pains. Not all of them, but it makes initial setup a lot simpler and faster.
with nix-darwin you can declare that config:
This is so much better, thank you for this.
Hmmm, is this supposed to do something on OSX 26.3? I tried setting it to 10 and it doesn't seem to do anything? Wonder if there's something new for Tahoe.
If you log out/in or reboot it will take effect.
Previously killing SystemUI server was enough to restart the menu bar, but that doesn't seem to do the trick anymore.
$ killall ControlCenter
Thank you!
Do you have anything else as useful as this? THis is perfect
Well I suppose I can't miss out on the opportunity to plug my open-source menu bar app for voice-to-text in any app! Going on three years of development, believe it or not.
https://github.com/corlinp/voibe
what are the default values, in case someone wants to restore them?
You can use `delete` instead of `write`:
defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing
Dude. How am I only just learning this? This needs to be plastered loudly over the internet
> Apple could certainly make some changes to prevent this being an issue at all.
Why Apple still hasn't fixed this in 2026 baffles me. The fact that a company the size of Tailscale has to find workarounds for an Apple blunder like this speaks volumes about how terrible Apple's software management is.
This seems like a good place to ask: What is the current state of the art for connecting back to my home network while remote? I want:
access to my home server
ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)
ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc)
ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on boot. This one is because I can't get OTA TV at home and want to set up a simple streaming box at someone else's house to do it that connects back to my house, so we can stream off all of our devices.
I'm guessing tailscale will be a part of this setup which is why I ask here.
Tailscale will enable all of this.
Set up a US device as an exit node, and configure other devices to proxy through it.
> ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)
Should note that Tailscale does not work natively with hdhr for mpeg television streams b/c wireguard doesn't natively support udp multicast/broadcast. Also can't directly port forward b/c hdhr sets a default ttl of 2.
My understanding is that most VPNs in general don't support udp multicast due to operating on the network layer rather than data link, though iirc OpenVPN supports multicast traffic through its virtual TAP (Layer 2) rather than TUN (Layer 3).
Tailscale does create a TUN/TAP virtual network[0], though udp multicast is still not natively supported.
[0]: https://tailscale.com/docs/concepts/tailscale-osi#data-link-...
https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1013
https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/11134
By 'stream US TV' I assume they just mean using popular streaming services like Netflix. If that's the case, than UDP multicast packets aren't involved at all, since it's all unicast.
Your advice would apply if they're using a local TV tuner or IPTV setup to share live TV on the local network or something, but that seems unlikely. But for content coming from mainstream Internet streaming services, it's good bet they're not using multicast.
For $5 a month you can also get a Mullvad VPN exit node. It’s billed directly through Tailscale which makes it painless.
When I’m outside the U.S. I get much better speeds through the Mullvad exit node than through my (U.S.) home exit node. I’m not sure why, since my home internet is gigabit fiber and I confirmed that I had a direct connection (no DERP relay).
Yes, you've described Tailscale + Exit Nodes + Tailnet that you invite your family to. Install Tailscale and enable some devices as exit nodes - it's pretty much as simple as that.
I just use WireGuard to connect my local network. I see no point in throwing a middleman into the mix.
This comment might be of interest to help you understand what Tailscale does that WireGuard cannot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064875
I would phrase that as what Tailscale does that is more convenient than wg. If you “barely know what a subnet is” go for it. wg is easy as pie though, and just don’t maintain 90 tunnels… You don’t need a full mesh. An extra hop or two, especially within a lan, won’t hurt.
I would recommend WireGuard as well, I primarily use it with Tailscale as backup. WG is straightforward to set up, and with LLM the knowledge gap is now nothing if you have trouble with it
I'm using tailscale for this and am finding it great. I have an Unraid home server/NAS, which has quite nice tailscale integration. The server can be used as an exit node, and each containerized application/workload can be configured to use tailscale and get a nice (https) address that works in your tailnet. I'm not close to hitting the free tier limits, though I'd be happy to pay for it (and I do pay for mullvad through them)
tailscale has a feature called "funnel" that will let others connect to a service running on your tailnet, even if they dont use tailscale themselves
Tailscale is probably what you want, but if you care about privacy you'll have to be sure to disable the telemetry/logging/spying option on each of your nodes.
By default it will leak your so-called “private” network behavior to Tailscale (connections on what port, from what node, to what node, opened when, closed when): https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging
Related question: how are people handling adding family members of varying technical abilities to your tailnets? Does each family member get a separate user so you can manage their access? For my immediate family I was just logging tailscale in as me on their devices, but that becomes a pain when they get logged out and need me to log in again before things go back to working.
if you are behind cgnat (both ipv4, ipv6) then vps, have public ipv6 then you can connect via public domain (ddns openwrt) and if you have a public ip, wireguard it is
I found good success with OpenWRT/Tomato and WireGuard.
The interface is bad when it comes to provisioning but it can be done with a QR code and once it works the native experience of turning on the VPN was just stunningly fast. In this day and age you expect things to be slow with negotiation and various unreliable steps but it was just amazing that I tap the VPN button on iOS and it's connected in a fraction of a second.
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.
This is a real problem, but when I complain about it I get told to just "hide the icons you don't care about" as if that's a solution.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346079
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.
You can hold command and drag the icons under the notch to make the invisible ones eventually show
> 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.
Poor eyesight? How about just being over 45?
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.
Yep, and there's no indication that anything is hidden, no dropdown/etc.
This is genuinely shocking that Apple is not handling that. Talk about quite a decline in one of their flagship products.
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.
From what I can tell, OS X is no longer one of their flagship products.
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
macOS UI/UX has been declining at an accelerating pace with each new version.
My only hope at this point is it gets _so_ bad it becomes an absolute meme and they get around to fixing it.
The weird duality of Apple: their hardware becomes better with each devices, while their software gets worse with each version.
iOS is a POS too, now.
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.
It's not even an edge case. It should have been considered an inevitable case.
Really depressing design dereliction and/or incompetence.
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.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/8y0QbZN
The gap between "Run" and "Tests" is the notch, which I don't usually notice is there unless I'm in Rider.
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.
Yeah, I was surprised that something this obvious wasn't addressed.
Investing in a visual redesign (Liquid Glass) but not an obvious UX issue of the notch hiding icons seems like a mis-prioritization.
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
Yes it is genuinely infuriating that this is the case for a company that for so long was praised for their superior UX.
This along with the tons of other paper cuts they've slacked on is tarring their brand.
It was Windows 7 when Microsoft added an overflow for tray icons, not XP.
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.
It's documented here: https://umidevi.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-make-windows-xp-...
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.
https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
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.
> I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS
Note that this particular problem has existed for well over a decade. It's atrocious, but let's not pretend it's anything new.
The macbook notch has existed for a decade?
No, menu bar items being hidden when there are too many of them has happened for a decade.
The notch has just made menu bar space more scarce than it used to be.
If you opened an app like Xcode with a lot of menus options, it would extend beyond across the screen and cover up your menu bar icons.
If I open Xcode today on a 14" MacBook, two menu items extend past the notch, and they still hide your menu bar icons.
This has been the case for a long long time, and it's always been an obvious failure case.
Menu bar icons overflowing. The notch just makes it a problem quicker, and in an exciting new way.
One of the mentioned apps, Bartender, was sold to a third party [0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40584606
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.
[1] https://www.macbartender.com/b5blog/Lets-Try-This-Again/
The other mentioned app, Ice, is unmaintained and no longer works on Tahoe. There's a maintained fork called Thaw.
Thanks, I'll check out Thaw. I've been using Ice without problems:
https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/releases/tag/0.11.13-dev....
It is ! I’m “solving” it with an app called bartender. It’s hacked and sometimes doesn’t work but was the only way I could manage this problem…
Apple software sucks so bad!
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.
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.
Useful menu bar manager for Mac that lets you hide multiple icons behind a single icon: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
I’m on mobile so don’t have the link handy but there’s a fork called Thaw that has been getting frequent updates
Oh! Thanks for that, I hadn't realized Ice's maintainer had stopped working on it: https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw
I had been using Hidden Bar but gonna give Thaw a shot now. Looks a bit more full featured and under active development!
https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
I’ve been using this for years. It’s simple and works perfectly: https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
KDE has it included!
Ewww, it's free and opensource!
The new window is nice and useful, but I find the window’s header to be on the very thick side.
Nowadays, that whole header should probably leave in the sidebar itself, and the sidebar could probably be more "Liquid Glass"-like.
Apple should solve this. Windows got a little menu that can popup this can't be that hard
They might be out of courage.
I stumbled across TailScale while I asked ClaudeAI regarding switching off of VPN: I wasnt aware of the tool.
Im "shocked" how perfect it functions! It worked out of the box for a fairly simple but old windows setup where I could apply it: Everything was perfectly fine, super user friendly in the beginning.
Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer
> Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer
I do exactly this! I keep Tailscale running my family's shared iMac, making it easy for me to remotely connect to it and screen share if necessary to help. I went a more complicated route[0] and installed Tailscale as a system background daemon that runs as root and starts up before the first user login. Which also means no GUI interface, so more protected from user error.
[0] https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/wiki/Tailscaled-on-ma... (the standalone variant is also entirely opensource, unlike their macOS GUI app)
> We’re working on a comparable UI for Windows devices
As a Linux user and fan of good GUI apps, it always bums me out I'm stuck with the CLI-only options for apps like Tailscale. Even for a simple tray icon I have to resort to buggy GNOME extensions.
I understand the fragmented ecosystem and small user-base on the desktop Linux side make it hard to justify, but I hope that changes one day!
Re: buggy GNOME extensions, it drives me nuts that GNOME has no built in support for menu bar icons/app indicators.
There's a whole class of GUI apps that should run in the background until needed, and GNOME just has no solution here. I really don't get why they removed this functionality.
I don't want a "service" model where you start/stop gui apps via systemd. And I don't want to keep a window around for no good reason.
this may have been what you were referring to with “ buggy GNOME extensions”, but in case it wasn’t:
https://tailscale.com/docs/features/client/linux-systray
It wasn't actually! I've been using a third party extension that tries to provide a similar tray icon (after moving from a different extension that doesn't support my version of GNOME) but it's really flaky. I'll try this. Thanks for the tip.
Menu items are so convenient.
Apple should let users double the menu bar height. Put the app menus, user name, current time and search along the bottom. A text only bar would look coherent.
Then put menu bar items on the row above. Default from right, but let users move items to the left.
I use hiding menu bar and dock. Dynamic Wallpaper toggles desktop files/widgets visibility. So my Mac's resting face is, and would remain, completely uncluttered.
Ironically, I have trouble with Tailscale and Mac SSO. I setup my tailnet with Apple SSO and when I want to connect on my non Windows device there is not an easy way to add a new user and the new user has their own tailnet. I wish I could just use tailscale with a passkey without using third party sso.
I use https://apps.apple.com/at/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066 Hidden Bar to workaround the menu bar problem.
This feels like one of those bugs that sounds niche until you put a work Mac through the usual gauntlet of VPN, MDM, chat, calendar, backup, and whatever else corp IT adds. Not catastrophic, but it is kind of wild that macOS still has no first party overflow affordance for menu bar icons.
Isn't it true that Apple just prefers apps not use the menu bar in the first place? I'm not sure where I had read that, but it might explain why Apple doesn't improve the menu bar. Personally I'm of the opinion that they should improve it because the current situation is untenable.
But am I misremembering this?
Not exactly, though many apps violate Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for macOS menu bar extras[1]:
Let people — not your app — decide whether to put your menu bar extra in the menu bar. Typically, people add a menu bar extra to the menu bar by changing a setting in an app’s settings window. To ensure discoverability, however, consider giving people the option of doing so during setup.
Avoid relying on the presence of menu bar extras. The system hides and shows menu bar extras regularly, and you can’t be sure which other menu bar extras people have chosen to display or predict the location of your menu bar extra.
Consider exposing app-specific functionality in other ways, too. For example, you can provide a Dock menu that appears when people Control-click your app’s Dock icon. People can hide or choose not to use your menu bar extra, but a Dock menu is aways available when your app is running.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Yes, it was a huge mistake to allow any random app developer to claim such a prominent and limited piece of screen real estate. But it’s been an option for so long now that everyone will scream bloody murder if they try take it away.
Apple’s opinion seems to be: running out of space happens to only a few people running tons of menu-bar-loving apps, so if you are dorky enough to run into this problem, you should be dorky enough to solve it yourself.
Back in the Mac OS X public beta days (and maybe even into 10.0–10.1?), apps that are nowadays shoved into the menu at used to live in the Dock. I kinda think I prefer that.
> no options to rearrange the menu bar items
This, at least, is not correct. Hold down Command and drag an icon to rearrange the order.
I think they mean developers have no way of requesting or specifying order.
Long experience with Window Taskbar icons has demonstrated you should not give developers that sort of control, only users.
I love Tailscale so much and when I got added to what may have been an A/B test for the windowed app, I was even happier with it. It's a great improvement.
I always change my screen resolution to avoid the notch on my Mac. It's non-obvious how to do this but you end up with a slightly shorter resolution than the default.
I know this means I'm wasting potential pixels, and wasting all the engineer effort that went into the nearly bezel-free design, but worth it IMHO.
I don't understand why people are still using Tailscale after the issue they had where two independent tunnels were connected together.
Never heard of it, could you send us a reference? What do you use instead?
I always assumed the justification for the notch would be FaceID on Macs. However, it’s been many generations and we still don’t see it.
i love that they posted a snippet of Swift code showing other developers how to detect this themselves!
> Apple, a company that traditionally favors simple functionality
but not being able to interact with an icon is DISfunctionality, though yes, a simple one. So that principle can't explain the bad design either.
I’ve been using Bartender (paid) and Thaw (free) to manage my menu bar. Recently, both apps have become quite buggy. I’m not sure whether this is due to macOS or if there are better alternatives I’m not aware of.
I feel like every app I use has gotten buggier in Tahoe, I suppose major UI rewrites will do that.
The hidden notch issue is a pretty big problem. I had to look for tools to shrink the width spacing just to survive, and it just looks bad
As a workaround, can Tailscale internally add multiple menu items and keep adding until one reports as visible?
The only reason I used Tailscale's menubar applet was to change exit nodes, I definitely don't need a whole UI.
Guess I'll just stick with CLI only for now (via darwin-nix)
Anyone know if this new windowed Tailscale view is enabled on the non-App Store version?
I guess I'll find out soon enough once I update, but I didn't see any specific callout in the article.
Yes it is
would love to be able to run two accounts (two tailnets) on my MBP. Haven't figured out a good solution.
This is all cool, but to allow ssh access I still need to install tailscale through brew?
i don't get it.
I use Tailscale from the App Store. To allow SSH access I simply turn on the Apple-preinstalled SSH daemon.
I really thought this was going to be an Apple acquires Tailscale post
yesterday i setup tailscale on a gcp VM.
i enabled route advertising and managed to ping my google cloud instances using tailscale
problem is the packet loss rate is high. SSH tunnel worked!
soo i think there is something wrong with tailscale
I personally found it confusing and un-Mac-like that quitting the configuration app also now stops the Tailscale service. It was unfortunate to discover this while I was AFK.
My recommendation is to rethink it to work like apps like 1Password, Default Folder, Keyboard Maestro, Ice, etc., where I can always easily open a configuration app, but the service must be intentionally/knowingly quit via either the configuration app or the menu bar utility.
TLDR: Please separate the service from the new configuration app.
This was driving me nuts but at some point very recently they added a "Hide Dock Icon" to settings.
I don't see what this has to do with the notch. There's limited space in the menu bar. The overflow is hidden with or without the notch.
It is a bit weird that Apple hasn't provided a simple UI indicator that some icons are hidden. All that's needed is a dot with a tooltip that opens the settings to configure the menu icons.
There's so much tailscale shilling on hn and if you say anything neutral you're voted down.
tailscale offers many good things.
for example "tailscale" drop for free, share files between devices on your network
also https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel which is cloudflare tunnel alternative, no more localtunnel or other things
so i am not surprized people like it as product, most good features are free.
Being a principled, critical thinker sure has its costs these days. Yeah, that's right, I said it. Flag me (lol).
It was way worse before AI
I use a wallpaper with a horizontal black bar at the top to make the notch invisible, so this catches me off guard pretty often.
Yes! More windowed interfaces! I hate apps that outgrow a modal. I hate losing the context. No wait I think I hate all modals.
Mullvad, your turn next please
Tailscale is really losing the plot to the movie.
It is an app that sits in the background and provides connectivity. Occasionally you need to change a setting. Absolutely nobody wants a rich windowed UI, or a menu bar widget that drops down a complex detail card.
I hope they can see this is exactly what killed desktop anti-virus: something that was supposed to be quietly doing its job in the background started getting in the users way. It needed to poke its head up and scream "hey remember me?" at the behest of some product managers or growth hackers. Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.
I feel like you don’t use tailscale. Because I use it every day - and I get confused when I can’t find it.
You're the one losing the plot. It's optional, still closes to the system tray without you explicitly docking it. It doesn't emerge at random like McAfee.
> Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.
So Apple are going to bake Tailscale into the OS? Also, read the blog. It's a response to Apple's bad user experience.
I have too many toolbar icons, so I do actually want the window to switch to so I can copy and paste IP addresses. I already keep it open so I can just command-tab to the window, and it's way better this way.
I use tailscale every single day.