On October 18, 2021, Apple introduced the redesigned 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro. It brought back MagSafe, HDMI, and the SD card slot. It shipped the M1 Pro and M1 Max, chips fast enough that people are still happily using those machines in 2026. And nobody talked about any of that for a week, because the screen had a notch in it.
I build a notch app for a living, so I have spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about this little black rectangle. Most of the arguments people have about it start from a wrong assumption. So let's fix that first, then get into what the notch actually is, and how it went from a punchline to something a lot of us genuinely like having around.
The notch is added screen, not stolen screen
This is the single most misunderstood thing about it. The 14 inch MacBook Pro has a 3024 by 1964 pixel display. A normal 16:10 panel at that width would be 3024 by 1890. Those extra 74 rows of pixels are new territory that older MacBooks simply didn't have: a strip along the very top, interrupted in the middle by the camera.
macOS puts the menu bar in that strip. Your apps, your videos, your full screen games all live in the clean 16:10 rectangle underneath, exactly the space you would have gotten anyway. Nothing was carved out of your working area. The bezel got thinner, the menu bar moved up into the reclaimed space, and the camera kept the spot it always had.
Once you see it that way, the design reads differently. Apple didn't punch a hole in your screen. It grew the screen upward around a camera that had nowhere else to go, and got a taller display plus dramatically thinner bezels out of the trade.
What actually lives in there
Three things, and fewer than most people assume:
- A 1080p FaceTime HD camera. The 2021 redesign doubled the old 720p resolution, which had been embarrassing for years.
- An ambient light sensor. This drives True Tone and automatic brightness.
- The camera indicator LED. Hardwired to camera power, as it has been on Macs for decades.
Notably absent: Face ID. There is no TrueDepth system in any MacBook notch, which is why the notch has always felt slightly oversized for what it contains. The working explanation is depth. The TrueDepth module needs more front-to-back room than a laptop lid a few millimeters thick can offer, and Touch ID on the keyboard already covers authentication. Whether Face ID ever arrives, the housing gives Apple somewhere to put it.
On October 18, 2021, the redesigned 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro arrived with a notch cut around the camera.
The notch is added screen, not stolen: Apple grew the panel upward around the camera.
macOS puts the menu bar in that reclaimed strip, so your apps keep the full 16:10 rectangle below.
Five years on, developers treat the notch as a location beside the camera.
How a camera housing slowly turned into a place worth using.
The Dynamic Island moment
For the first year, the Mac notch was purely a shape to tolerate. Then in September 2022 the iPhone 14 Pro shipped the Dynamic Island, and Apple did something clever: it treated the cutout as a stage. Timers, music, calls, and live activities animate out of the sensor region as if the hardware and software were one surface.
That reframing mattered more than the feature itself. It proved a cutout doesn't have to be dead space. But here is the strange part: Apple never brought any of that thinking back to the Mac. Four macOS releases later, the notch does exactly what it did in 2021, which is nothing. The menu bar flows around it, and that is the entire story.
So third-party developers filled the gap, myself included. If you're curious what that looks like in practice, I wrote a whole guide to Dynamic Island style setups on the Mac.
A short timeline
Living with it
macOS does make a few accommodations. The pointer slides behind the housing instead of bumping into it. Apps that misbehave with the taller menu bar can be forced into a letterboxed mode via Get Info, where the whole interface renders below the camera. And in full screen, most apps simply paint the top strip black, at which point the notch visually disappears into the bezel.
The one real, recurring annoyance is menu bar space. On the 14 inch machine especially, a healthy collection of menu bar icons will collide with the notch, and macOS quietly hides the losers with no indication they exist. If that's your daily fight, I've written about menu bar cleanup strategies separately, because it deserves its own post.
From flaw to feature
Here's my honest read after building software around this thing for a while. The notch was never a great piece of industrial design on its own. It was a compromise: a bigger screen and a better camera in exchange for an odd silhouette. Apple made the trade, shipped it, and moved on.
What changed is the software. Somewhere between 2023 and today, developers stopped treating the notch as a blemish and started treating it as a location: the one fixed landmark on the screen your eyes already know, sitting in space no app was using anyway. Drop a file toward it and it becomes a shelf. Play a song and it grows album art. Start a screen recording and the status lives right there next to the camera actually doing the recording.
That's the version of the notch I find genuinely good, and it's the corner of the Mac I've chosen to build in. If you want to see how far the concept stretches, this tour of everything the notch can do in 2026 is the natural next read, and the comparison page shows how the different notch apps approach it.
The black rectangle isn't going anywhere soon. Every MacBook Apple sells today has one. You can hide it, ignore it, or put it to work. After five years, I'd argue it earned the third option.