Menu Bar Setup for a New M5 Mac

The menu bar is the one piece of interface you look at all day without ever deciding what should be in it. On a new Mac it shows Apple’s defaults, which are conservative, and within a month it fills with icons from every app you install. Ten minutes now sets a baseline you will still be happy with in a year.

Turn on battery percentage

Off by default, which means the battery is a small graphic you have to interpret rather than a number you can read. System Settings → Control Center → Battery → Show Percentage. Full detail in battery percentage in the menu bar.

Make the clock useful

The default clock shows the day and time. Whether you want seconds, a 24-hour format, or the date depends entirely on your work, and all of it is under Control Center → Clock Options. Two worth considering: 24-hour time removes any AM/PM ambiguity when scheduling across time zones, and showing the date saves a trip to the calendar several times a day. See the menu bar clock.

Decide what lives there before it fills up

Everything under Control Center in System Settings can be set to Show in Menu Bar, Show When Active, or hidden entirely. The middle option is the useful one and the one most people never find: Bluetooth, AirDrop and Screen Mirroring appear only while you are using them and stay out of the way otherwise.

Work down the list once, now. Later, when an app installs its own icon, you will notice it immediately because you know what belongs.

The notch problem

On a MacBook with a notch there is a hard limit on menu bar icons, and apps with long menus can be pushed behind it and become unreachable. It is not a bug you can configure away, so the practical answers are: keep fewer icons, use Show When Active aggressively, or connect an external display where the limit disappears. See menu bar icons behind the notch.

Hiding icons you cannot remove

Some apps insist on a permanent icon. Hold ⌘ and drag menu bar icons to reorder them, which lets you push the ones you tolerate to the far end. For anything more aggressive you need a third-party menu bar manager, and hiding menu bar icons covers the options.

Auto-hide, and why most people should not

You can hide the menu bar entirely under Desktop & Dock → Automatically hide and show the menu bar. It reclaims a strip of vertical space, and on a laptop that sounds appealing. In practice the menu bar is how you reach most application commands, and a hidden one costs you a deliberate mouse movement every time. Worth trying for a week before committing — unlike the Dock, this one tends to be regretted.

The rest of the visual setup is in appearance settings, and the settings worth changing covers the broader defaults.