Hide the menu bar around the MacBook notch

On the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro and the newer MacBook Air, the camera notch sits inside the menu bar. Auto-hiding the menu bar drops that whole top band — notch included — out of view until you reach for it, so your wallpaper or app runs clean to the top of the panel. Set System Settings → Control Center → Automatically hide and show the menu bar → Always.

What auto-hide does with the notch

The notch is part of the physical display, so it never physically disappears — but the black menu-bar band that surrounds it does. On the desktop, the wallpaper fills up to the top edge and the notch blends into it; in an app, the window's content extends up and the notch reads as part of the top margin rather than a bar cutting across your icons. Hiding the menu bar is the closest macOS gets to making the notch area feel like plain screen instead of a fixed strip of chrome.

Turn it on

1. Open System Settings → Control Center.
2. Scroll to Automatically hide and show the menu bar.
3. Choose Always to hide it everywhere, or On Desktop Only if you just want the wallpaper clean around the notch but keep the bar in apps.

Push the pointer to the top edge and the bar — with the notch spanning it — slides back for as long as you need. This works the same on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia. From Terminal:

# Hide the menu bar band around the notch
defaults write NSGlobalDomain _HIHideMenuBar -bool true

# Show it again
defaults write NSGlobalDomain _HIHideMenuBar -bool false

The preference takes full effect after logging out and back in, so use the Control Center toggle for an instant change.

Notch details worth knowing

• Full-screen apps already hide it. When an app goes full screen, macOS blacks out the area beside the notch and hides the bar automatically. Auto-hide extends that clean look to the desktop and ordinary windows.
• Menu bar icons behind the notch. If you keep the bar visible and have many status icons, some can be hidden behind the notch. Auto-hiding sidesteps the crowding by keeping the bar out of sight most of the time.
• The camera still works. Hiding the bar changes nothing about the camera in the notch — Continuity Camera, FaceTime, and the green recording dot behave exactly as before.

Other ways to handle the notch

Auto-hiding is the cleanest option, but not the only one. See how to hide the notch on Mac for approaches like a dark wallpaper that blends the band, and when each makes sense.