Move the Menu Bar Below the Camera Notch On Your MacBook

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about the MacBook's camera notch and how you can force the Menu Bar to appear below it. 

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 2000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/Patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. 

Now if you have a recent MacBook you know you've got a Camera Notch at the top. So normally when you see the Menu Bar it is divided into a left side and a right side with the Camera Notch in the middle. In most cases this works out nicely. For instance here I am in the Notes App on my MacBook Air and I can see the Menu Bar items on the left and then the other Menu Bar buttons on the right. The camera notch being in the middle doesn't get in the way. Even pretty big apps like the Mail App, here, can usually fit all the Menu Bar items on one side like this. But occasionally you're going to run into very complex apps, like Numbers here, that has so many items in the Menu Bar that the menus are on the left and they spill over onto the right and actually take away some of the room for the buttons on the right. There is actually nothing under the Camera Notch right now. It is just pushing the Menu Bar items to the other side of it. 

So a request I hear often is how can I get the Menu Bar to not do that. To maybe just push the entire Menu Bar down and have the Menu Bar go across like you don't have a Camera Notch. After all you can say that today's MacBooks have a Camera Notch but you can also say that previous MacBooks actually had a notch as well. It just went all the way across the screen and had a much wider space to the top to accommodate the camera. Today's screens actually have part of the screen to the left and right of the camera allowing you to use more of the space in the top part of your MacBook. So you've actually gained some space, not lost it with the Camera Notch. But it would be nice to sometimes to be able to have the Menu Bar look as it did before. You can in specific situations!

I'm going to quit Numbers right now and I'm going to go in the Finder and create a New Finder Window that is looking at the Applications folder. Here we're going to see a list of all my applications. Now, when I select an app, like Numbers, and I get info on it I'm going to use File, Get Info but Command i is usually what we use for this. You're going to see a checkbox scaled to fit below built-in camera. You can check that and now it is going to push the Menu Bar below the Camera Notch but it is not going to do it in regular window mode. It's going to do it in Full Screen Mode. So, with this selected I'm going to launch Numbers again. Now notice I don't see any difference. However if I click the Green Button here, or hover over it at Enter Full Screen or use any other method to go to Full Screen Mode notice that the Menu Bar goes away. Now if I move my Pointer to the top the Menu Bar will actually come down below the Notch. So I've got a black bar, that I don't really see, going across the entire top of the screen. The Menu Bar is below it. 

Now this is different if I had this turned Off. Have it turned Off and then I go to Numbers and I move my Pointer to the top notice that the Menu Bar now fills the space at the top and there's a notch there. You don't even see it here because the Menu Bar is black in this case. But the notch is actually there and it is pushing the View Window and Help Menus to the right. If I go into System Settings and then go to Control Center at the bottom I've got the ability to change it so the Menu Bar is never hidden. So I'll select Never there. So I can say this is how it looked if I've got that special feature unchecked. Then if I check it, note that I have to quit Numbers and then launch it again for this to take effect. But you see now in Full Screen Mode here it's pushed down the Menu Bar and that allows it to be able to go all the way across, because the notch is actually above this. I can even move the Pointer above this. It actually has removed that space from the screen's real estate completely. 

So whether or not you want to use this is up to you. Some people really like to be able to eliminate the notch in cases like this even though it means loosing some screen at the top. Other people, like me, don't care about the notch. I would rather have the Menu Bar use that space there. Apple actually has a page that goes into detail about this special feature. So you can read more about how it works if you want. It seems like it should work for some apps that don't actually have a Menu Bar. So perhaps some games. It would force the game to actually appear below the notch. Now in all the games I tried the games already appeared below the notch whether or not this checkbox was On or Off. So I think it comes down to the developer. The developer can actually force the game to never appear underneath the notch, which is probably the proper way to do it. But if the developer hasn't done that, like say it's a much older app, then you can force it with that checkbox. 

Now what about if you want to force the Menu Bar below the notch in regular Window Mode. There doesn't seem to be a way to do that. But you can kind of do it by changing your display settings. So if you go to System Settings and then you go to Displays, you've got these different options here. Now any of the default options are going to use the notch. But if you Control Click on any of these options you can choose Show List. Then once you have Show List you can choose Show All Resolutions. Some of these Resolutions are slightly different screen ratios than what you've got. So if you choose something that is slightly wider, then of course you're going to have black bars at the top and bottom, just like if you were watching a widescreen movie on a TV. It would give you black bars at the top and bottom. That, of course, means that the notch at the top wouldn't come into play. So instead of 1280 by 832 I'm going to switch to 1280 by 800 here. You can see what it does is it forces the window down so I don't actually have any part of the screen where the notch is. So you can play with these different resolution settings noting that not only are you getting rid of pixels at the top of the screen but also at the bottom of the screen. But some people may prefer it that way anyway so I thought I would mention this option. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.