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Comment by adam_arthur | Hacker News Reader

I've been looking on and off for a way to do this for years.

Surprised more people aren't bothered by not being able to use the space next to the notch... it's not even consistent with the iPhone which does allow rendering apps around the notch.

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I basically never do full screen, so for that reason I'm not bothered. (In fact, now I'm _less_ bothered, since I somehow no longer feel like the menu bar is "wasting" space.)

I never use the "fullscreen" mode either, and don't understand the point of it. But you don't ever have a window that spans the full vertical space of the screen?

You can hide the menu bar and have it only appear on mouseover, thus not wasting space. Except on non-notch Macs you can place windows where the menu bar used to be, and on notched Macs you can't

Good point, but I just went through all my open apps and the only app that had empty toolbar chrome (the top part of a window that has the Close/Minimize/Zoom without anything else on that row) was Telegram and VSCode.

The rest of the apps have app UI on the same row as the Close/Minimize/Zoom buttons which would be hidden by the notch.

But empty toolbars is a good usecase for rendering an app window on the notch. I'm actually surprised how many apps utilize that space!

I'm not concerned with whether what's covered by the notch is empty or not. Chrome has tabs that would be covered by the notch, but its largely irrelevant, I can still click it or swap to that tab easily enough.

Similar to how the notch doesn't materially degrade video content, despite covering some aspects of the video. We've seen iPhone make the choice to intentionally obscure a portion of app content for years without any major concerns.

Fair enough. But it's why the notch space doesn't feel like pure waste.

If you right-click -> "Get info" on most applications, there's a checkbox for "Scale to fit below built-in camera (notch)".

I've only had to use that for one game and iirc Parallels.app that were rendering on top of the notch. It would be nice if you could force the behavior per app with that, but it's only to fix apps that, I suppose, use some drawing API that lets them render on top of the notch.

That's a fair point -- for whatever reason, I could never get into auto-hide for the menu bar (tho I do use it for the dock). I think maybe because I tend to trigger showing it accidentally too much (vs the dock on bottom where it's not an issue because usually there isn't other actionable stuff down there)?

But definitely, if you like menu-bar autohide where you're coming from makes sense.

Yeah.

Modern videos are so wide that a little extra vertical space barely enlarges the video if at all.

Games usually can't use the space since the notch covers their UI.

For me it's just free space for the menubar.

Not to say you can’t be bothered, but I look at it this way. I’m honestly only really looking at a small amount of my screen at a time…. I suspect I use that space very little.

So why ever get a larger screen?

Maybe you feel that way, but it's not a commonly shared belief. There is a marginal value to having additional screen space, and its silly to block use of it via software gates.

More applications on my screen at a time?

So you say space isn't important, because you look at a small portion of the screen at a time, yet having a larger screen is useful to have more space to place apps?

So, in the end you're saying screen real estate is important? Or not? You have to pick one to be logically consistent.

I’m not OP, but I don’t see an inconsistency about what they actually said. They didn’t say screen real estate doesn’t matter at all, only that the specific space under discussion isn’t a concern to them. I imagine many Mac users can relate, especially long time Mac users who remember when the menubar couldn’t even be hidden.

As far as the value of larger versus smaller screens, I can also relate to OP. When I’m sitting with my laptop on my actual lap, I definitely have fewer things on screen at any given time than when I’m using my comically large 43” desk monitor. I’m generally not looking at more things on that monstrosity at any given time! But being able to “switch” to them without interacting with a mouse/keyboard is a convenience that the larger screen affords. Even if I don’t care about trying to shove more of my active focus into the top few pixels of either screen.

> They didn’t say screen real estate doesn’t matter at all, only that the specific space under discussion isn’t a concern to them

"More space matters, but not if it's 100px at the top of the screen"

If you are a believer that additional screen space provides some marginal value, as the majority of people do, then you cannot at all argue that there's nothing lost by losing screen space. If you believe that you only need 15" and anything beyond that does not provide additional marginal value, then you can be logically consistent with these two statements.

If you don't see the logical inconsistency, I can't help you, sorry.

I have a comically large 43” monitor sitting on my desk, so maybe you’re not engaging the things people are saying in good faith.

There is no faith. Either screen real estate matters or it doesn’t. If you have a 43” monitor and think its useful, then you must agree that having 100 extra pixels on a 16” screen is also useful.

You absolutely cannot argue in good faith otherwise. Its a provable mathematical fact that the beliefs are incongruent.

You are free to choose to hold logically inconsistent beliefs though. You do you

Same. I just use topnotch and hide it. At first it bothered me but I’m used to it now.

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