I build a notch app for a living, which makes a guide to hiding the MacBook notch a slightly strange thing for me to write. It is a bit like a barista publishing a guide to quitting coffee. But people ask me this constantly, half the advice floating around is outdated, and the honest answer fits on one page. So here it is: every method that actually works, with exact steps, followed by the case for doing the opposite.
One expectation to set first. You cannot remove the notch, because it is a hole in the panel with a camera inside it. What you can do is make it invisible, and macOS makes that surprisingly easy.
There are exactly four real methods. Everything else you will read on this subject is one of these four wearing a hat.
Method 1: the black wallpaper trick
The notch sits inside the menu bar strip, and the macOS menu bar is translucent: it tints itself with whatever wallpaper is behind it. Give it a wallpaper whose top strip is pure black and the bar renders essentially black, at which point the notch dissolves into it.
Note that dark mode alone does not get you there. The dark menu bar is a translucent gray, and the cutout stays visible inside it as a purer black rectangle. You need actual black pixels behind the bar.
The trick works far better than it sounds, especially on the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro. Those machines use the mini-LED Liquid Retina XDR panel, and its blacks run deep enough that a black menu bar becomes optically indistinguishable from the bezel and from the notch itself. You genuinely cannot tell where the display ends and the cutout begins. On a MacBook Air the panel is a conventional LCD, so in a dark room you can still catch a faint glow outlining the cutout, but in normal lighting the illusion holds up fine.
- Open your wallpaper in any image editor (Preview is enough) and paint the top strip black, or pick an image that already fades to black at the top.
- Go to System Settings, then Wallpaper, and set the image.
- Check that the black area really sits behind the menu bar. If the aspect ratio is off, macOS can crop your black strip out of frame.
That is the entire trick. Cost: zero. Software installed: none.
Method 2: TopNotch, the automated version
Editing wallpapers by hand gets old around the third time you change one. TopNotch by Sindre Sorhus automates the exact trick above: it darkens the wallpaper region behind the menu bar for you, keeps up when you change wallpapers, and covers your Spaces without being asked. It is free.
This is what I point people to when they want the notch gone and never want to think about it again. Install it, flip the toggle, done. A few other utilities occupy the same niche, but I have not found a reason to recommend anything over TopNotch: it does one job, does it quietly, and comes from a developer with a long record of small, well-behaved Mac tools.
Method 3: the per-app letterbox
This one ships inside macOS and almost nobody knows it exists. Apple built it as a compatibility escape hatch for older apps whose interfaces collide with the camera housing, and it hides the notch more thoroughly than anything else on this page.
- Open the Applications folder in Finder and click the app once to select it.
- Press ⌘I, or choose File, then Get Info.
- Tick Scale to fit below built-in camera.
- Quit and reopen the app.
The effect is bigger than the checkbox implies. While that app is open, the whole display scales down to the area below the camera. Not just the one app: every window on screen drops beneath the camera line, and the top strip goes black from bezel to bezel until you quit the app carrying the setting. Your MacBook briefly impersonates its 2020 predecessor.
Two footnotes. The checkbox only appears for apps that have not declared themselves compatible with the taller menu bar, so most modern software will not offer it at all. And this is the only method here with a real price, because the scaled mode surrenders the extra screen rows entirely. More on that in a minute.
Method 4: full screen, which you already own
Click the green traffic light on any window, or press ⌃⌘F, and macOS paints the strip around the camera black by default. The menu bar slides away, the app gets the clean 16:10 rectangle underneath, and the cutout melts into the top bezel.
Video players, games, and slide decks have effectively been notch-free since the day these machines launched. If your complaint was ever that the notch ruins movies, there was never anything to fix. It does not appear during full screen playback unless an app deliberately opts into drawing in the whole strip, and almost none do.
One related tip that circulates a lot and does not work: auto-hiding the menu bar (System Settings, then Desktop & Dock, then Automatically hide and show the menu bar). That makes things worse. With the bar gone, the cutout floats directly over your wallpaper instead of hiding inside a dark strip.
| Method | Effort | Scope | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Black wallpaper strip | Two minutes, once | The desktop, all day | Dark band can clash with light wallpapers |
| TopNotch | One install | Every wallpaper and Space, automatic | Same dark band, one more app running |
| Get Info letterbox | One checkbox per app | The whole display while that app runs | Gives up the extra pixel rows |
| Full screen | None | One app at a time | The menu bar hides with it |
Hide it if the cutout genuinely bothers your eyes; the black wallpaper trick or TopNotch handles it.
Keep it if the strip reads as wasted space, since it sits above the rows your apps get anyway.
The same strip, two honest answers, depending on how the cutout reads to you.
What hiding it actually costs
Now the counter-argument, and I promise it is not only because I sell software that lives up there.
The strip around the camera was never taken from your apps. The 14 inch MacBook Pro drives a 3024 by 1964 pixel panel; a plain 16:10 display at that width would stop at 1890 rows. Those 74 extra rows sit above the space your apps would have gotten anyway, which is exactly where macOS parks the menu bar. I walked through the full arithmetic in the notch history post. The letterbox setting hands those rows straight back, which is why I only recommend it when a specific old app forces the issue. The wallpaper trick keeps the rows but dresses them in black, which looks sharp over a dark wallpaper and vaguely like a mourning band over a light one.
The other cost is opportunity. The notch is the one fixed landmark on your screen, parked in territory no app was using, and it has quietly become the most useful dead space on the Mac: a drop target for files, a spot for playback controls, a home for timers and live activities. I keep a running list of twelve things the notch can actually do, and that list is the reason I built Droppy to occupy the space rather than erase it. Once the strip is doing work for you, the urge to hide it mostly evaporates, and a whole category of Mac apps now exists on exactly that bet.
So should you hide it?
Hide it if it genuinely bothers your eyes. Some people register the cutout once on day one and never see it again. Others notice it every single time the screen wakes, and no amount of pixel arithmetic argues anyone out of a visual itch. If that second group is you, use the wallpaper trick or TopNotch: free, reversible, two minutes, and the only side effect is a permanently dark menu bar.
Skip the letterbox checkbox unless one stubborn old app forces your hand. Trading 74 rows of screen to hide a camera housing is a poor deal in 2026.
And if the notch strikes you as wasted space rather than an eyesore, run the opposite experiment before you paint over it: give the strip a job for a week and see whether the black rectangle starts reading as a fixture instead of a flaw. It did for me. Though admittedly, I moved in.