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Tailscale's new macOS home

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567 pointstosh310 comments

The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??"

No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket.

I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app.

Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe.

This could have been handled better.

It's such a simple problem to solve too: when there are too many menu bar icons, put them in an overflow menu. A single icon which contains a list of icons. And let me arrange which icons go into the top bar and which go into the overflow menu.

Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard.

But nooo, macOS just silently hides applications from you, with no visible indication that there's anything hidden.

Even if they didn't want to have an overflow menu for some reason there it boggles my mind why the menu bar isn't just aware of what portion is covered and should be skipped (file menus or icons) in the first place!

Well there's effectively no space on the lefthand side of the notch. You must assume that side is going to be completely consumed by actual menu items.

Side note: If you want to check what icons might be buried by the notch, you can Cmd + Drag any icon from the menu bar to rearrange them. If you drag an icon through the notch, the other items will pop into view, if any are hidden.

An even simpler solution is allow horizontal scrolling in the area.

That would be gross. I wish devs didn’t abuse menu bars (looking at teams, zoom etc)

That's a much worse interaction.

Compared to flaky bartender, I‘d prefer even that tbh.

The same problem exists on the left side of the notch, too.

File, Edit, View, History, Window, Help

Where there are too many items, it gets silently truncated. A simple dropdown icon on overflow is such obvious UI here.

One of the first things I tasked to do as a junior web developer at my first job was to make a horizontal nav menu that was responsive such that when the screen shrinks any overflow items go into a drop-down.

Baffling that a trillion dollar company can't do this.

Edit: apparently i don't know the difference between vertical and horizontal :)

This is not an unknown issue at the fruit co.

Can anyone speculate on any rational if not good reasons for not solving this problem yet?

I don’t work at the fruit co but since you asked for speculations. Mine: the fruit co designers are still designing a nice interface to show the overflow, because they obviously think that the Windows tray overflow looked inelegant and are still searching for the ideal UI. But the designers themselves don’t have a lot of menu bar apps so they don’t think it’s a priority.

Or perhaps the teams at fruit co found a way to claim that their overflow is an innovative new feature and not copied from some other designs.

While they do a ton of good work, they do love to claim everything was first invented by them.

Probably the same response I just saw someone reply with in this very thread:

"You shouldn't have so many utilities running"

It's the go-to Apple user response to anything the OS doesn't support or does poorly: "Why would you want to do that?"

That’s the company response but I’m definitely not the only long-term Apple user whose go-to response is a sympathetic nod followed by a long rant about Tim Cook and his contempt for software engineering.

Considering that I need a good dozen utility apps to override absolutely bonkers macOS design descicions there is no way around that.

Windows has always baffled me with the system tray icons it is too cluttered. I grew up with a tricked out Linux desktop so I understand the need to customize. But most of the time you do not need that.

I believe a VPN should stay hidden if it works, no need to have it visible.

> I believe a VPN should stay hidden if it works, no need to have it visible.

Which is fine if you only have one VPN client or one VPN network and you don't need to turn it on/off or change it regularly.

My current day job has one VPN client but five different networks.

At a previous job I had two different clients I would need to switch on and off.

It is very on-brand with Apple though that there is one right way to do things, and everyone else either needs to change the way they do things or go elsewhere.

I disagree with this one. If a VPN is important, I want to see that it is still connected and hasn't crashed.

TBF, there isn't a computer on earth that will solve that problem perfectly. At some point, "you shouldn't have so many utilities running" is perfectly acceptable advice.

No, because their icons can simply be collapsed into a disclosure control.

"You'll run out of memory eventually" was my point.

That's the standard apologist response to ANY defect you point out in anything, or any question they don't know the answer to but still want to bloviate about.

See: Stack Overflow

They think you're holding it wrong.

The upcoming MacBook Pro (late this year) is rumored to have a hole-punch camera: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/24/touchscreen-macbook-pro...

It‘s reasonable to assume that menu bar items will be rendered differently as well, to accommodate for Dynamic Island (which changes its width as needed).

Well I mean, recently because they have no idea how to make good UIs, and have not read their own enormously detailed (and excellent) Human Interface Guidelines tomes from 10, 20, and probably 30 years go, and have basically regressed to barbarism.

But before that relatively recent fall-off-a-cliff event (whatever it was that caused it, most of us will never know), it was pretty clear that they didn't want to implicitly endorse the lazy/anti-user/Windows-equivalent-UX antipattern of having apps that intentionally made themselves accessible only from a menu bar icon.

I hate the App Store shite that goes wildly too far the other way, but I don't quite understand wwhy they couldn't figure out a way to enable the menu bar widget API in a way that failed if your app didn't also have a way to open via all the normal ways (double-clicking the icon in /Applications, asking Siri to launch it, etc)

> and have not read their own enormously detailed (and excellent) Human Interface Guidelines tomes

This seems to also apply to all new UIs produced by apple in the last 5 years.

> they didn't want to implicitly endorse the lazy/anti-user/Windows-equivalent-UX antipattern of having apps that intentionally made themselves accessible only from a menu bar icon.

The single biggest complaint I had when I switched it to Mac was lack of this feature. Still miss it. .

Perhaps people who have many menubar icons are hare-brained and you should check to see how many icons they’ve got before you price your product for them to account for the support overhead.

Ahh yes, blame the clients for a broken OS that should "just work".

Of course you are gonna get more complains from people who struggle more with technology, this does not mean these are the only ones with menu bar icons hidden behind the notch.

The reason things are this way is that in Apple’s view, third party devs are effectively misusing menu items.

Originally it wasn’t even possible for third parties to add new menu extras using public APIs. That was something reserved for Apple. Third party devs had to use a tool called MenuCracker.

When Apple finally added the API used now, the intention for it was for full fat GUI programs to provide ephemeral menu item companions that disappear when the host app is quit. It was never intended to facilitate persistent third party menu extras.

So the issue hasn’t been fixed because in Apple’s view it’s a problem of third party devs’ own creation. If all third party menu items were ephemeral nobody would have enough for them to overflow into the notch area.

——

Personally I think they should offer a way to extend the Control Center and push devs who want persistence towards that. That would afford better organization for users and allow them to better control which are immediately visible (since some apps don’t offer an option to hide their menu item).

> Personally I think they should offer a way to extend the Control Center and push devs who want persistence towards that.

They actually added that in macOS 26. Just like on iOS, apps can now offer custom actions that you can add into the control center.

I haven’t looked into it, but does it allow arbitrary UI? It sounds like they’re just buttons that trigger a single action, which isn’t sufficient for replacing menu items.

It's also abused by soo many devs, just wanting there app to be seen 24/7 by the users, regardless if there app gains anything from being in the menu bar. That's why many users run out of space. Most people don't look at settings or ways to remove them (if they even give an option), so they quickly fill up the menu bar. Back in the day without a notch, people would have so many that some menu items would disappear too.

I am so glad that macOS Tahoe just lets me banish those apps to the shadow realm

I believe being able to remove these icons were possible since Leopard/Snow Leopard days.

Not the ones from apps

You might be right. It was long ago, and I was a Mac OS X newbie back then.

I do love that change. I’d deleted Bartender when it sold out, and now I’m glad that I don’t need or miss it at all.

A couple of my colleagues have so many applications running at the menu bar, so they have to use Bartender to be able to have anything resembling a functional menu bar.

I understand power users, but I don't understand these users.

Weird. I think I have about 4.

Someone is confusing the menu bar for the Dock

Currently I have 6 extras, which is a rare number I see. My normal number is 3.

Your experience is not everyone s experience. Are you one of their colleagues. No? Then they weren’t talking about you.

They don't have to be one of my colleagues to share their own perspective and experience. We're a rather large band of computer using people here, and it's good to share experiences and viewpoints.

Try a corporate laptop. Every stupid thing you don’t need except to know it’s running is there, but you don’t know it’s running because they may just be hidden.

Jamf, zscaler, virus checkers, etc. need to all go to hell with this crap. I’m glad Tailscale are removing theirs.

… on my MBP, if we discount the icons that ship with macOS, the limit is 4 items. Past that, they're hidden by the notch.

I don't get why an overflow arrow once the limit is reached is so hard here.

Or letting users decide what the order of items in the bar should be.

command-click-and-drag them to where you want 'em. don't need bartender for this

There’s no statement or action (such as banning menu-bar-only apps from the Store or even changing the APIs) supporting that Apple still wants menu bar items to be ephemeral.

If they wanted to enable persistent third party menu extras they’d open up the same APIs that Apple themselves use.

They basically did.

That's not really defensible as an excuse, especially considering Apple's grooming of users to believe that they never need to quit applications.

All Apple had to do was add a "more" indicator at the end of the area, at the very least. Or... to give all applications' entries equal footing, collapse them all into a disclosure control once there are too many to show.

But no... once again, a simple and fair solution eludes Apple's "designers."

If the “simple and fair solution” makes it so lazy developers lose money over putting things in the menu bar where they most definitely should not be putting anything, then so be it.

Stop putting things in the menu bar. End of.

Yes, the number of apps that actually deserve space up there is rather small. The last thing Apple should do is enable a Windows tray style free for all.

I don't disagree.

I’ve been looking for something like your brothers app. Used to use an app called helium for floating video windows. I’ll check it out!

It's annoying for end-users (and you), but why not display a window with a SUPERSHORT message explaining that MacBooks with a notch might hide the icon on the first launch? Have a button or link to explain more for people who want it.

Shouldn't have to, but it might mitigate some of the stuff a FAQ won't catch.

I forgot such messages directly. Then when It realize I saw an important message tens seconds ago I have no way of going back. I can not press undo and get that message again.

Error messages are a bad design. Error logs are ok. Global undo would be king like the undo close tab feature in browsers.

Ice is an open source app solves this problem through an overflow menu:

https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice

Ice is no longer actively maintained. You might want to look at Thaw.

I never understood the logic behind the thinking there. Why would you ever want to place menubar items UNDER the notch, if you know it's there and they won't be visible?

It's such an easy problem to fix, with such incredible usability consequences, I just don't get the thinking.

"Think Different"

"Courage"

The notch itself is probably considered temporary internally. If you code a rule for the notch, then you're going to have to consider which hardware OSX is running on in order to determine if the notch is present or not for your "notch width calculation."

It's true this is a mess, but no application should have a menu by icon as its only means of access. It's OK to offer that as an option, but all applications should be capable of presenting a user interface when launched from the Applications directory (or (rarely) ~/Applications, etc).

There's really no exception to this rule. For an (tiny) minority of applications, it makes sense to hide the dock icon, and to typically access the app via hotkey or menu bar widget. But those apps should still have an icon and should still be able to be invoked by opening it using any of the standard ways to do that. That's just how the Mac works.

The truth is most apps have no business having a menubar icon, but many of them cannot even be disabled out of the box. There's a number of third-party tools that help with the issue, but really this should be handled at the OS level. I want a permission similar to notifications to control whether an app can litter the menubar or not.

It is in Tahoe, which is on the short list of things I strongly, genuinely like about the update.

Thank you! I did not know about this change, even though I already am on Tahoe. Much appreciated.

You’re welcome! I stumbled across that myself. It wasn’t exactly a premier feature, yet still one of my favorites.

One thing's for sure: No application should be allowed to have a menubar item without a ToolTip. WTF, that should have been obvious from day one.

At the moment, I have 11 of them on my system (not counting the clock), a mix of third-party and Apple ones. NOT ONE of them has a ToolTip.

Even worse, if you click on them, the resulting menu does not show the name of the owning application. This too should be forced. For example, I unfortunately have to run Microsoft Teams, and its toolbar menu gives you no indication of what application it belongs to.

There is no reason for apps to be in the menubar. Either they should have a dock icon or be hidden completely. And open a window with functions and settings when opened by spotlight.

I'm curious if people even cared about the half-centimeter extra screen space they got when Apple introduced the notch into MacBooks. Arguably it makes a bigger difference in iPhones so I'll grant them that, even if it does hide half of the top bar of the iPhone. But did people hate the half centimeter bezel on macs that much that they wanted to lose an inch of their task bar? Genuinely curious how we got here!

The pissing and moaning about "bezels" is cacophonous in certain echo chambers.

It's sad to see Apple taking cues from a minority group of infantile users, but that's one way we got here.

I mean, I don't love large bezels, but I dislike less screen real estate even more. Are the bezel nerds happy with where are now??

My android phone (OnePlus 11) has a hole punch front camera so I don't lose too much screen real estate. It's annoying sometimes but I prefer it to my mom's iPhone's giant notch.

The hole punch design absolutely horrendous. It makes everything uneven visually speaking and it just looks like - screen defect. The notch is fine, not perfect, but fine, and leagues above that stupidity of the hole punch.

Well I guess Apple and Android both found their target markets in both of us!

Once you find out that the notch can hide app items it makes you want to throw your computer out of a window.

Agreed. I hate the notch. I run "Just Say No to Notch" from the App Store to avoid the problem entirely.

Every time I get a new Mac, I run these commands to reduce the spacing between menu bar icons. Lets you fit at least 2x the number of items in the menu bar.

```

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2

```

This is so much better, thank you for this.

Dude. How am I only just learning this? This needs to be plastered loudly over the internet

This was always my biggest gripe about using a mac, the OS that "just works". I ended up a bunch of commands I had to run and a stack of apps I needed to install for it to feel usable.

And for years and years when in discussions about Linux vs Mac, Linux was always slammed as having to be customized and "user's should never have to use the terminal" . (I agree with that, but even in 2014 I remember having to run terminal commands to tweak stuff to make it work more like I wanted to)

Ironically I ended up on linux. Windows went to crap, and I figured if I have to run a bunch of scripts to make my OS usable I may as well just use linux.

Honestly, I couldn't be happier. I get so much more out of my hardware and I enjoy the experience so much more.

On a laptop? I’m interested but have never found sleep/wake and battery life to ever remotely approach osx and a Mac.

Many Lenovos and Dells work pretty well. I use a frame.work laptop and it continually gets better. It's not flawless, but personally I accept that the many benefits of using Linux will come with some tradeoffs. To me it's very worth it. Great battery life and flawless sleep/wake on my macbook weren't worth the inferior (IMHO) UX of macos. If you really care about those things, there are some good resources out there (including a good community of frame.work people).

TBF - It still does "just work," The fact that it doesn't completely fit into your (and my) preferences doesn't really change that, and if that's the standard, then everything will fall short of it.

If the icons are just hidden and you can't find them in order to use the programs you have running, that's not "just working". That's broken functionality. Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.

I have never seen anyone with enough menu bar icons to have them hide, nor have I known anyone who ran into that problem. It’s a bug that should be fixed, but I just don’t think it’s as big of a deal as it’s made out to be.

Just because you have never personally seen a bug occur doesn't mean it isn't a problem.

This very article is about how Tailscale frequently gets reports of them being hidden.

And I personally have had the icons hidden. My work laptop has a lot of stuff running on it (much of it is mandatory: VPN, custom company processes, Google Drive, etc) and combined with my personal preferred programs (f.lux, etc) it occasionally hits the limit and goes under the notch.

Did we read the same article? It literally drove them to create a new application.

This is the fairly standard Apple defensework where "it just works, but if it doesn't work it's probably not a real problem" despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

"I don't have any experience with that problem, it follows that no-one has that problem".

It only takes like 6 extra apps for items to start being hidden, it's really not that rare of an occurrence.

"nor have I known anyone who ran into that problem"

Why on earth would people tell you that?

I vastly prefer Mac over Windows, but I think you have a good point. This is definitely one area where Microsoft found a more reasonable solution.

I’ve been solely mac user for the past 15+ years, and have no idea what this thread is talking about. I think, as the other person said, we make assumptions on what’s a problem for others, when in reality, it’s not a big deal.

Why does every Mac complaint thread since the beginning of time always feature the "I've never heard of this so it must not be a legitimate issue" guy?

Ah, but does it work when mice are using the computer, or is it only when humans are.

New research indicates proprietary software may be less toxic than scientists previously believed, in mice.

Are these mice the one-button species?

My biggest frustration with Apple was the number of buttons on their mouse. They heard my complains, and changed the number of buttons by one. I just didn't think they'd go to zero instead of two!

Just because you have never hit the issue doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This particular issue will only really show up on notched devices with a small screen and a lot of status bar icons. It's highly dependent on what model mac you run on.

It will not only cut off icons but the menus for applications when they have a lot of them. There is no way to fix it except to change your scaling or connect a second monitor.

I should save this thread for every time someone tries to tell me that Windows is a horrible operating system that is a major reason to not buy a computer when I say things like "The MacBook Neo isn't that good of a deal and you can totally find a Windows laptop in the price range that's built well enough, has similar performance/battery life (or better)/trackpad, and leaves you with more RAM, storage, and I/O."

I've literally picked out laptops that are clearly better buys than the Neo/Air and people will tell me things like "well then you're stuck with Windows" or "but you'll have firmware problems" and then we have to remember that Apple has had plenty of that in their past.

How about those Nvidia GPUs that would fail inevitably in older MacBook Pros?

Or the butterfly keyboard?

Or how they can’t even make window corners that match with the Liquid Glass update?

Do you have a suggestion for a Windows laptop that’s a better buy than the MacBook Neo? I kinda want a Windows laptop (for being able to run simple games, mostly) but not sure which one

Walmart is selling a HP gaming laptop with 16GB RAM and 512 GB SSD for $699—same price as the Neo.

Keep in mind it's not Magic Mac Memory because someone will jump in and tell us that 8GB of Mac memory is clearly superior to 16GB of PC memory because Macs are able to swap and wear down your SSD in the process.

I have pointed out this stat before:

Global user base

Mac: 100 million (2024)

PC gamers: 900 million

A lot of Mac enthusiasts seem to scoff at the idea that someone buying a laptop wants it to be able to play some kind of video games. Apple can make the greatest computer in the world but for many customers the fact that it can only run ~5% of games or whatever is a dealbreaker.

The Neo can play many games on some level but having 8GB of RAM plus needing to share it between the CPU and GPU is a major disadvantage.

The lack of a fan also hampers performance of the chip inside of it by something like 15-30%, rather than including one for a nominal cost to maximize performance.

It’s totally fine for the intended customer but it’s a computer for a very specific customer, more niche/specific than a customer who “just wants to play some CS:Go on the side.”

Apple could swallow their pride and partner with Steam but they’ll never willingly encourage their users to use a different App Store even if it makes the computer better.

The ability to run without a fan is not a problem; it's a feature. Would you want a fan in your phone?

It's fine, but it's a design decision with tradeoffs, and gamers are prepared to make different tradeoffs (bigger and noisier are ok if they deliver a big enough performance jump).

Is that the tradeoff they make with the Nintendo Switch? I’ve never heard the fan in my Nintendo Switch and it’s a very compact device. My Nintendo Switch 2 is also very compact, smaller and lighter than a MacBook Neo, and it can play AAA games at high frame rates (e.g., Resident Evil: Requiem) while the MacBook Neo struggles with 5 year old titles like Cyberpunk.

This is a very comparable device considering it’s also an ARM-based computer essentially.

We need to stop making excuses for Apple’s unwillingness to include a basic form of cooling for their low end devices. It’s just price segmentation. Make the cheap stuff artificially slow, push you up to the MacBook Pro.

If you cannot hear the fan in a Switch, I implore you to get your hearing checked. It’s not a noisy fan, it’s not a problem the fan is there, but it’s not silent!

I don’t believe I ever said it was silent.

Do you not agree that having a fan in the system was a good design trade-off?

> I’ve never heard the fan in my Nintendo Switch.

If that's not saying it's silent for you, you don't only need to get your hearing checked.

I listen to the game audio, which is why I don’t hear it.

I still never said it’s silent. I merely implied that it’s quiet enough to satisfy the design parameters, where it is so quiet it’s forgettable. My ears might hear it but my brain doesn’t notice it. Maybe you need to dust out your Switch, it’s not a loud system.

I have no idea why you’re arguing this so hard, but I guess people just go crazy to defend trillion dollar corporation Apple. Enjoy your fanless computer that gives up 15-30% performance just to save a few millimeters and $3 on the BOM.

I bet Mac zealots would be surprised to find out that almost every PC with a fan comes with configurable modes so you can decide how loud or quiet you want your system and trade off performance. Crazy right? The user gets to choose for the situation rather than having to choose at time of purchase.

I would rather own a system that doesn’t slow down after 7 minutes of sustained activity. MacBook reviewers act like this is no big deal since they don’t play any games like the other 900 million PC gamers in the world. “Oh, your video exports will be done by the time throttling starts, so it’s not big deal.” These reviewers also only know about video editing since it’s their job to edit videos. But playing games is by definition dependent on sustained high performance. If I lose performance after 7 minutes I’m losing performance for most of my session.

It's also a con. You get worse sustained performance. You also get a hotter device. There's a reason the base model M series MBPs consistently bench higher than the exact same chip MBAs in things like Cinebench. The fan.

As I’ve pointed out in my other comments, the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 are perfect devices to dispel this whole “no fan is better” narrative.

Clearly it’s not a challenge to make a compact, performant device with a nearly silent fan. Clearly customers don’t mind that devices have fans even for devices meant to be held in hand for hours that weigh less than a pound.

I can buy a handheld from Nintendo for $450 that can play new AAA games with great performance while the Neo struggles with 5 year old titles like Cyberpunk despite likely having better overall hardware. A MacBook Neo with a fan would get 15-30% better overall performance and +50% framerate in games as has been demonstrated by multiple tinkerers on YouTube.

When he said games did you assume he meant Solitaire?

What about the fan in the Nintendo Switch? Do Nintendo Switch owners hear the fan or consider it a problem that stops them from making a purchase?

I don’t know why people parrot this talking point about a lack of fan being a positive feature. It’s like a shared propaganda talking point that Mac enthusiasts all agree upon universally. If Apple added fans to the Air and Neo you’d all change your tune since Dear Leader changed their mind, just like when Apple enthusiasts stopped blindly hating Intel suddenly during the architecture transition. You’d all say stuff like “Apple gave us boosted performance and you can’t even hear the fans! All those PC laptops that I’ve never cross shopped since 2001 sound like jet engines!”

A simple passive heatsink has been shown to boost performance significantly in the MacBook Neo.

The throttling of the chips in Apple’s lower end systems are an intentional form of price segmentation. The MacBook Pro won’t be any faster than the Air if the Air was just cooled properly.

I would unironically take a fan in my phone if it stopped it from throttling, dimming the screen, and halting charging when it’s a hot day in direct sunlight. It would just have to make sense in the context of a phone design, of course, which is a challenge.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/118431

There are phones on the market with detachable active cooling solutions to help with sustained intense gameplay:

https://rog.asus.com/phones/rog-phone-9-pro/

Nice of you to decide we’re just parroting instead of thinking.

If the MacBook Air had a fan, it would be thicker and would need a bigger battery. It would then be the same, aside from the screen, from the base MacBook Pro. You are 100% correct. The fact it has no fan allows Apple to reduce its weight and thickness. Thus reducing its price. You’re absolutely right.

Fans in laptops are more and more a gamer pilled flight of fancy. Phones and iPads have shown they’re not a necessity.

Removing a fan reduces the price? By how much do you think? Is the Nintendo Switch expensive because of the fan?

Is the Nintendo Switch/Switch 2 a thick device? They are thinner than the MacBook Pro, and they have more space constraints than a MacBook Neo.

If fans in laptops are just for “gamer pilled” why does the MacBook Pro have one?

Do you think Apple can continue to grow their marketshare indefinitely if they continually ignore the 900 million PC gamers who currently own Windows PCs? The PC gaming market is the only one that has been growing since 2021.

https://www.techspot.com/news/106371-gaming-industry-hits-wa...

The iPad doesn’t prove anything, it’s routinely criticized for wasting its performance potential with inflexible and limited software. Its performance limits are never tested because you can’t actually do things on it in comparison to a full desktop OS.

My phone will regularly dim the screen, halt charging, and throttle performance when I’m out in a sunny day during the summer. You ever been to Miami? I would actually be interested in an actively cooled phone if it existed and would accept a device that was thicker.

Computing as gone on one road; less parts. Separate northbridges, daughter boards for everything, floating point coprocessors, spinning media. All those things have been simplified, reducing the parts count of a usable computer.

I don't bet against simplicity. Those who really require complexity pay for it. On the Apple side, that now includes those who need sustained throughput achieved by a fan.

This can depend on what’s on sale in your region. I also have some thoughts about buying at this price range down below.

I’ll shill a website for a YouTuber called bestlaptop.deals. It tracks sale prices and has reviews attached for the laptops, along with categories for use cases. Shopping for Macs less frequently involves big sales but with Windows laptops being patient can pay off.

I’ve seen on recent reviews indicating Windows on ARM has made really great strides, from including support for anti-cheat for many online games. Not every game works but many do without any effort.

I bring these up because the battery life is excellent and many of them are in the $500-600 range.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=f8EbtQ7jQnQ

Yes, that’s a sponsored video, but I’m linking it to show you his commentary on the software situation.

For x86-based computers there are a couple of ways you can go:

Since you mentioned gaming, you can sacrifice some portability and go with something like a Lenovo LOQ. A previous generation unit will cost about $700 and have an RTX 4050, which is enough to beat anything Apple will sell you before you get up to Pro chips. I believe there are other OEMs that may hit that price point with an RTX 5050 which of course will be an improvement.

These systems do get good battery life when you’re in integrated graphics mode. When you’re gaming you’re going to be plugged in regardless of laptop.

Another one I’ve seen on sale lately has been the Yoga 7 14” with either the Ryzen AI 340/512GB storage or the Ryzen AI 350/1TB of storage. I think the sales aren’t as good as were a couple weeks ago. These have a 2K OLED screen, 2-in-1 and pen support, generally good overall systems. The 350 model has significantly better integrated graphics performance so I’d try to stretch for that one.

Finally, in-person I was really impressed with the Acer Aspire 14 AI for being only $530. I did wish the screen was a bit better but the rest of the system was really impressive to be hitting that price.

There was an HP OmniBook I played with in store that had a great aluminum build, though the value wasn’t quite as good. It seemed like it was designed to compete with the Air and felt to me like an Air clone in a way.

I haven’t touched on used, which is obviously an option. There are a lot of options there and I think it’s worth looking into.

I would still say, if you can, spend more than what the MacBook Neo costs. The MacBook Neo isn’t a revolutionary device that changes the game in my mind. Instead, it’s a machine that makes a lot of similar sacrifices that other cheap laptops make. It’s better if you save up and spend more if you can.

For example, you’re interested in gaming, you just missed an amazing sale on the RTX 5070Ti/32GB RAM version of the Zephyrus G14 at Best Buy. It was $500 off, so about $1800 for a really amazing machine that is basically the best thing and light gaming system on the market.

Also keep in mind as I talk about this, I’m biased against 15-16” models. I like 14”.

I’m with odo1242, where’s a $700 Windows laptop that has the Neo qualities? I like my Thinkpad - it’s currently my only Windows machine - but it was $1300 or so for the entry-level model (not going to count my add-ons).

I don’t love Windows, but I don’t hate it either. Amazing backward compatibility, and that is not to be ignored.

Yoga 7, check Best Buy, although I think the discount was bigger a few weeks ago.

It’s actually better in many ways: 2K OLED touch screen, convertible with pen support, double the RAM, backlit keyboard, ranks better on battery life for office tasks, a far wider array of ports.

If you stretch to the 1TB model you get the Ryzen 7 AI 350 which beats the Neo on integrated graphics and multi-core processor speeds. You’ll pay a little more but if you need the storage the Neo is out of contention already, and at that price your MacBook Air will come with 256GB.

> Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.

I was a huge Windows fanboy, now completely Apple but this was single most annoying regression of functionality when switching and one of the only things I miss.

It doesn’t just work though - icons are hidden from users, with no way of users knowing they are hidden.

macOS is still better than windows, but my feeling is it’s more of a glass of cheap warm whiskey in hell than a cool glass of ice water.

That phrase "just works" speaks more to vertical integration than it does to any more specific claim about UX, alignment to preferences, or immediate productivity, and to demonstrate how foundationally this is encoded, you implicitly alluded as much in that opening phrase "a mac, the OS" that directly conflated the hardware and the software.

Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers. Not out of any blinkered misconceptions about quality, usability, or an otiose love for Apple or their products otherwise.

> Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers

All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.

Unless you install the bare OS from scratch. Apple bundles the drivers for their hardware with their OS.

Good luck with plugging in anything non-Apple branded or not using standard USB audio or Ethernet CDC and you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts that almost certainly will break in the next OS release.

You can do this for Windows too, that's how most corporate images are built.

One image and 30 different laptop models, that's how it's done in every competently run megacorp IT department. Do you think some poor technician is manually loading drivers onto every Windows laptop?

> you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts

Apple has replaced kexts (kernel extensions) with a user-space alternative for many years now

Hence

> that almost certainly will break in the next OS release

My scanner has drivers available for download that date from 2015 with no updates since then.

My solution to this very problem was to virtualize an ancient OS X (was not easy) so I could continue to use a perfectly good scanner.

Though I'm certain you've raised this issue before, and it was met with "I've never heard of anyone needing a scanner, you must be doing something weird, have you tried taking a picture of it with your iPhone(R) instead?"

> All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.

If you’re lucky. One laptop I had in the past (and ultimately returned) had an issue where the vendor-provided NVIDIA drivers were the only ones that allowed its GPU to perform correctly, but were very outdated, which resulted in Windows Update continuously updating them and dragging performance back down. I even tried using the policy editor to lock the drivers in but that failed too because the drivers are split into several pieces and I’d inevitably miss some component, resulting in broken half-updated drivers.

> Unless you install the bare OS from scratch

This caveat is doing enough heavy lifting for an Olympic podium.

The users who run into issues with menubar space would probably be well served to question if they really need all that stuff. The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness or weird issues... because they have 2 dozen utilities running in the background that they don't consider, which are all looking for CPU time or trying to change the default behavior of the OS in conflicting ways.

My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS. I had a similar desire with the system tray on Windows (though it was more difficult on Windows due to some hardware requiring it).

Work is the only place I have an issue, because they install a bunch of security agents that all want a spot in the menubar, even though they never need me to interact with them or know what they're doing. Those agents sitting up in the menubar tend to be the reason my system has slow downs or issues. Though the slowdowns have gone away since moving to M1. On Intel my fan used to run all the time. Now I'm just left with the weird issues they cause.

Ah, got it, I’m holding it wrong.

> My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS.

My goal is to use the apps I want to use, and if they are exclusively menu bar apps, what can I do about that?

> The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness

The cause for system slowness on my mac are too many browser tabs eating 500 MB memory each, not a few 10 MB native Swift apps.

Basically the view I had twenty years ago vs the view I have now. After being a UI-extender explorer for some years, I became a system-as-delivered person. I'm now at a healthy (for me) mix. I have a bunch of icons in my menu bar and an app to keep that tidy.

I agree. My menu widgets aren't the primary cause if my computer feels slow. It's almost always a ton of browser tabs because I collect stuff to investigate later and I procrastinate removing them.

However, I also see the point of the commenter that a lot of people who have a bunch of shit in the menu bar might not be computer people who understand what they are or how they got there. In those cases, people exploring things they don't know how to remove might accumulate a lot of other crap that causes a slow system.

I'm not even talking about app icons.

I'm talking about the file manager missing features.

Wifi issues going back years and years.

Default mice settings that make me want to throw the thing out a window. Seriously, who moves their cursor that slow?

The worst window manager I've ever used.

I could go on, but it's genuinely pointless. People love their macs like people love their sports teams. No matter what, some people will always love the maple leafs.

iStat menus (or the new open source "Stats") is a brilliant use of the menu bar, but it can take a lot of space!

Then couple ordinary services that add menu bar icons that you don't even ask for (DropBox, Docker, Adobe, etc.) and you can overflow onto the notch quite quickly.

I use iStat Menus and I recently got one of those menu-bar expander utilities. It’s so good I forgot its name already!

Now I just click on the chevron whenever I need to access Tailscale or Postgres or CloudFlare or Creative Cloud Dropbox or Google Dropbox or ……

Really solved the problem for me.

You'll have to get back to us with that name!

okay, i questioned whether i need all that stuff and i've landed on still wanting the same set of capabilities i currently have at the cost of what used to be a reasonable number of menu bar icons.

so now what

Tame the clutter, by using another menubar app to hide the overflow.

Examples:

https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden

https://www.macbartender.com/

> The users who run into issues with menubar space would probably be well served to question if they really need all that stuff

Look, I don't even want half that stuff, but the reality is that a bunch of tools mandate by my employers, and a bunch of utilities that are needed to make modern MacOS work reliably, all live up there.

A couple of VPNs, DropBox, OrbStack/Docker, eqMac to unfuck volume control on external displays, BetterDisplays and BetterSnapTool to unfuck everything else about external displays... I'm already most of the way to the notch on a 14" macbook

When I set up a Mac I have a short list of things that I need to install. When I set up Windows I have a much longer list of things that I need to un-install. I much prefer the former.

Well said!

And when I setup nixos, I have a single command which installs/configures everything.

Windows isn't the alternative if you're on hacker news, OpenBSD and linux are the alternatives.

To me, it's the difference between caring about productivity and caring about improving productivity.

If you care about productivity and want your computer to "just work", install stock Mac OS (with maybe a utility or two), and you don't have to worry about anything for the next 3 or so years.

If you want to constantly fiddle with configs and spend hours just so things work exactly the way you want them to, sure, go with a BSD or whatever.

No judgment either way, this is a hobby like any other. Some people like to paint, some people like assembling model airplanes, others like building their oS from source and making sure the window is exactly the shade of blue they want it to be. Nothing wrong with any of the three.

Whataboutism

You expect someone to ship you an OS personalized to your taste and preferences ?

This should clearly be editable in a GUI somewhere.

nix-darwin solves a lot of those pains. Not all of them, but it makes initial setup a lot simpler and faster.

I'd argue that for most people, the system defaults are fine. They don't have GUI controls / preferences for most of the stuff that power users and the HN crowd might need. However, they provide a path for people at those levels with CLI commands.

I think it's a fair balance. If you're running a bajillion things that add menu icons and you don't also care about computers enough to want to learn more, that's probably pretty frustrating. Most of the people I've met who care a lot about custom software have been curious about going further. Small sample size, just my two cents.

Be glad that you have options at all. They could have not put them in user defaults

I just wish we could get these settings in nice plain text files so we can version control them and edit them easily.

Hmmm, is this supposed to do something on OSX 26.3? I tried setting it to 10 and it doesn't seem to do anything? Wonder if there's something new for Tahoe.

$ killall ControlCenter

If you log out/in or reboot it will take effect.

Previously killing SystemUI server was enough to restart the menu bar, but that doesn't seem to do the trick anymore.

Thank you!

Do you have anything else as useful as this? THis is perfect

Well I suppose I can't miss out on the opportunity to plug my open-source menu bar app for voice-to-text in any app! Going on three years of development, believe it or not.

https://github.com/corlinp/voibe

what are the default values, in case someone wants to restore them?

You can use `delete` instead of `write`:

defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing

with nix-darwin you can declare that config:

  system.defaults.NSGlobalDomain = {  
    NSStatusItemSpacing = 2;  
    NSStatusItemSelectionPadding = 2;  
  };

Been using this trick for a while. It's wild that this isn't exposed in System Settings somewhere. macOS basically treats third-party menu bar apps as second-class citizens and then acts surprised when users are confused.

My only gripe, it only seems to apply to the macOS items. The ones put there by apps still seem to be spaced out the same as before. The macOS ones are definitely closer.

> Apple could certainly make some changes to prevent this being an issue at all.

Why Apple still hasn't fixed this in 2026 baffles me. The fact that a company the size of Tailscale has to find workarounds for an Apple blunder like this speaks volumes about how terrible Apple's software management is.

It really is very simple. Because people keep purchasing their products.

This seems like a good place to ask: What is the current state of the art for connecting back to my home network while remote? I want:

access to my home server

ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)

ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc)

ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on boot. This one is because I can't get OTA TV at home and want to set up a simple streaming box at someone else's house to do it that connects back to my house, so we can stream off all of our devices.

I'm guessing tailscale will be a part of this setup which is why I ask here.

Yes, you've described Tailscale + Exit Nodes + Tailnet that you invite your family to. Install Tailscale and enable some devices as exit nodes - it's pretty much as simple as that.

Tailscale will enable all of this.

Set up a US device as an exit node, and configure other devices to proxy through it.

> ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)

Should note that Tailscale does not work natively with hdhr for mpeg television streams b/c wireguard doesn't natively support udp multicast/broadcast. Also can't directly port forward b/c hdhr sets a default ttl of 2.

My understanding is that most VPNs in general don't support udp multicast due to operating on the network layer rather than data link, though iirc OpenVPN supports multicast traffic through its virtual TAP (Layer 2) rather than TUN (Layer 3).

Tailscale does create a TUN/TAP virtual network[0], though udp multicast is still not natively supported.

[0]: https://tailscale.com/docs/concepts/tailscale-osi#data-link-...

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1013

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/11134

By 'stream US TV' I assume they just mean using popular streaming services like Netflix. If that's the case, than UDP multicast packets aren't involved at all, since it's all unicast.

Your advice would apply if they're using a local TV tuner or IPTV setup to share live TV on the local network or something, but that seems unlikely. But for content coming from mainstream Internet streaming services, it's good bet they're not using multicast.

For $5 a month you can also get a Mullvad VPN exit node. It’s billed directly through Tailscale which makes it painless.

When I’m outside the U.S. I get much better speeds through the Mullvad exit node than through my (U.S.) home exit node. I’m not sure why, since my home internet is gigabit fiber and I confirmed that I had a direct connection (no DERP relay).

Where's the Mullvad exit node located? It may just be geographically closer to your travel location than your home is. Even if it's about the same distance geographically, the routing path is different and traffic to whatever datacenter is running the mulvad node can be routed to more efficiently than your residential ip.

poking around with MTR (traceroute and ping combined) using various exit nodes and destinations would give you some more information if you're interested.

They offer a ton of locations around the world, like most VPNs. But I mostly used locations in the U.S. near my home exit node. I suspect it is something related to routing.

I found good success with OpenWRT/Tomato and WireGuard.

The interface is bad when it comes to provisioning but it can be done with a QR code and once it works the native experience of turning on the VPN was just stunningly fast. In this day and age you expect things to be slow with negotiation and various unreliable steps but it was just amazing that I tap the VPN button on iOS and it's connected in a fraction of a second.

I just use WireGuard to connect my local network. I see no point in throwing a middleman into the mix.

This comment might be of interest to help you understand what Tailscale does that WireGuard cannot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064875

I would phrase that as what Tailscale does that is more convenient than wg. If you “barely know what a subnet is” go for it. wg is easy as pie though, and just don’t maintain 90 tunnels… You don’t need a full mesh. An extra hop or two, especially within a lan, won’t hurt.

I would recommend WireGuard as well, I primarily use it with Tailscale as backup. WG is straightforward to set up, and with LLM the knowledge gap is now nothing if you have trouble with it

if you are behind cgnat (both ipv4, ipv6) then vps, have public ipv6 then you can connect via public domain (ddns openwrt) and if you have a public ip, wireguard it is

Tailscale is probably what you want, but if you care about privacy you'll have to be sure to disable the telemetry/logging/spying option on each of your nodes.

By default it will leak your so-called “private” network behavior to Tailscale (connections on what port, from what node, to what node, opened when, closed when): https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging

Related question: how are people handling adding family members of varying technical abilities to your tailnets? Does each family member get a separate user so you can manage their access? For my immediate family I was just logging tailscale in as me on their devices, but that becomes a pain when they get logged out and need me to log in again before things go back to working.

- For homes with close family (parents and siblings), I setup a subnet router and local DNS server on a Dell Wyse, making it one of their DNS servers so it can point them to services

- Yes, they should have their own account. However you can only add a few before you need to move to a paid version

- You can disable the expiry for nodes, which should keep it connected and prevent you needing to sign in again for them, for the most part

I'm using tailscale for this and am finding it great. I have an Unraid home server/NAS, which has quite nice tailscale integration. The server can be used as an exit node, and each containerized application/workload can be configured to use tailscale and get a nice (https) address that works in your tailnet. I'm not close to hitting the free tier limits, though I'd be happy to pay for it (and I do pay for mullvad through them)

tailscale has a feature called "funnel" that will let others connect to a service running on your tailnet, even if they dont use tailscale themselves

Surprised noone mentioned netbird. I got annoyed of unpredictable speeds I'd get via tailscale and the fact that I am not in charge of my VPN. I now rent a 5 euro VPS at Hetzner(get an ip with it) and host netbird running on it and my home server/pc as an exit node.

I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out 25 years ago)? I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS but this is absurd.

This is genuinely shocking that Apple is not handling that. Talk about quite a decline in one of their flagship products.

Hasn't menu bar applets crowding with no official overflow menu been a problem with MacOS with an obvious solution (add an overflow menu) for... 2+ decades now? I know third party solutions exist and it's kind of an edge case, but still, I remember encountering this back in the day on my ancient plastic Macbook.

It's much worse than it used to be. Before it was only really a problem with apps with a lot of menus, and you could access the items by switching to an app with fewer of them. Now, the notch takes up a lot of space, and you hit it really soon on a 14" display—I can only have maybe three third party menu applets on top of my collection of built-in ones before they disappear into the notch.

I think it's not just the notch, but that menu bar icons are more widely spaced than they used to be. I want to say it happened around Sonoma (10.14)? I was working on a Mac app at the time. Icon styles went from dense with a generally square clickable area to widely spaced, wide rectangular clickable area, and a highlight with rounded corners when clicked.

I have a 16 inch and even I moved to the “no notch” resolution last year because a ton of apps don’t let you choose whether to have a menu icon, and many of them are required corporate crapware. Apple should have bought Bartender and made it part of the OS 10 years ago, or at least before shipping this stupid notch. Apple’s “we know what you need better than you do” approach is so exhausting.

My workaround was to restore pre-notch behaviour by picking a resolution from the "show all resolutions" list that is conveniently+ exactly screen res height minus notch height.

I theoretically "lose" that much height but gain a) zero notch b) non-rounded top corners and c) a traditionally heighted menubar instead of the giant one that is so big only to cater for the notch.

+ I thought this was thanks to BetterDisplay but it turns out no third party tool is needed and it's all first party probably because someone at Apple is as annoyed by the notch as I was and so that's their solution.

I think it is because they want to send to apps resolution list that includes or excludes the notch area to choose from for full screen modes (eg in games). Selecting "show all resolutions" basically shows this list.

From what I can tell, OS X is no longer one of their flagship products.

they kindamostly cared when it was OS X. everything's been a bit of a mess since it became macOS while trying to make a unified platform for all their hardware

iOS is a POS too, now.

Did you ever think it was good? Aside from the tight integration with other Apple products enabling extra features, I never liked it better than Android. Switched for work, not really a choice. Still use “DROID!” from the OG Moto Droid as my text tone.

Yeah, it was pretty good, even without the "tight integration." The most important integration I can think of is answering texts on my computer. This is a huge win. And it does suck that Android still lacks a central syncing facility like iCloud.

I do think we benefit from competition. I also have a Moto Droid and it was OK, but there was some janky UI. And the noises... talk about infuriating. The phone was always making noises with no indication as to WTF was making them or what they meant.

macOS UI/UX has been declining at an accelerating pace with each new version.

My only hope at this point is it gets _so_ bad it becomes an absolute meme and they get around to fixing it.

The weird duality of Apple: their hardware becomes better with each devices, while their software gets worse with each version.

One of the mentioned apps, Bartender, was sold to a third party [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40584606

I think they've cleaned it up since then [1], but in the age of supply chain attacks, very concerning. Personally, even as a paying user of Bartender, I moved to the open source solution, at least I can watch the github for changes.

[1] https://www.macbartender.com/b5blog/Lets-Try-This-Again/

The other mentioned app, Ice, is unmaintained and no longer works on Tahoe. There's a maintained fork called Thaw.

Thanks, I'll check out Thaw. I've been using Ice without problems:

https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/releases/tag/0.11.13-dev....

Yep, and there's no indication that anything is hidden, no dropdown/etc.

Yes it is genuinely infuriating that this is the case for a company that for so long was praised for their superior UX.

This along with the tons of other paper cuts they've slacked on is tarring their brand.

> I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS

Note that this particular problem has existed for well over a decade. It's atrocious, but let's not pretend it's anything new.

The macbook notch has existed for a decade?

Menu bar icons overflowing. The notch just makes it a problem quicker, and in an exciting new way.

If you opened an app like Xcode with a lot of menus options, it would extend beyond across the screen and cover up your menu bar icons.

If I open Xcode today on a 14" MacBook, two menu items extend past the notch, and they still hide your menu bar icons.

This has been the case for a long long time, and it's always been an obvious failure case.

No, menu bar items being hidden when there are too many of them has happened for a decade.

The notch has just made menu bar space more scarce than it used to be.

I run into it when using Rider. I have text size increased on my Macbook and Rider has 8000 menu items, so my menu icons (all of which are default macOS, no third-party stuff) will be hidden to make room for Rider's stuff. I have to switch over to another workspace or window (i.e. away from Rider) if I want to access one of them. It's annoying but I'm not sure who I blame here; Rider I guess, for having a zillion menu items.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/8y0QbZN

The gap between "Run" and "Tests" is the notch, which I don't usually notice is there unless I'm in Rider.

Why not blame Apple for having a busted-ass menu bar design? The behavior of "if the menu is busy, icons just disappear" and advice like "apps shouldn't rely on menu bar icons" are just bad ideas. They don't work well with how people use computers or how developers write apps. It's a bad design.

I prefer to blame Rider because it's the only app where I encounter this problem, and it seems more like a "don't make your list of menu entries so long it spans the notch and pokes into the menu icons" error than anything else to me. Simple as.

Unfortunately for me, notch overflow happens to me in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, VSCode, Outlook, Excel (and Word and probably all of the other Microsoft Office apps), LibreOffice, IINA (mpv frontend), CotEditor, IDEA, and QtCreator, just among those installed on my work machine.

> Simple as.

Neither Apple nor app developers control either what font sizes a user needs or how many apps they're running which produce menu bar icons. In that context, "not so long that it [...] pokes into the menu icons" isn't even well-defined. It's literally meaningless unless you parameterize it according to factors like those, which is not "simple as" anything.

It's a computer screen, not a page in some particular print magazine.

> it seems more like a "don't make your list of menu entries so long it spans the notch and pokes into the menu icons"

Only counting menu bar items that either (a) come with the operating system or (b) are imposed on me by applications that my employer forces me to run for compliance or other purposes, there are eleven mandatory icons in my menu bar at all times. So it doesn't matter whether the app in focus has few menu items or many; I run into this issue regardless.

> I prefer to blame Rider

There are a few ways to make sense of the situation, but none of them look great for Apple tbh.

If the menu bar is well designed but it doesn't work well with increased display scaling, accessibility is a second-class (or worse) concern in Apple's design.

If the menu bar is well designed but it doesn't work well when there are dozen menu bar icons, then it isn't suitable for environments where users don't control the number of menu bar icons they have to deal with— this, of course, is many professional environments.

So either: macOS isn't genuinely intended to be accessible, macOS isn't a general-purpose operating system for professionals, the menu bar has a bad design, or some combination of all three.

Of the three, "the menu bar's design is bad" seems the simplest and least absurd.

To be clear: this is not really new with the notch. It's been menu bar icon behavior for decades where if there isn't enough space for all the menus plus menu icons, menu icons disappear with no way to get to them. The notch just acts like the last menu item now (albeit even if there's space between the last menu item and the notch, for applications without a ton of menus).

And yes, it's completely bizarre that macOS doesn't provide an overflow menu. Instead, again yes for decades, you've had to buy/use something like Bartender for this. It is utterly bizarre and inexplicable.

With Tahoe, Apple has finally provided a half-solution, which is that in System Settings you can entirely hide select running menubar utilities to regain some space. But of course that's only helpful for utilities you never need to look at or click.

tl;dr: yes this is utterly absurd but it's been absurd for decades. It's nothing to do with recent versions of macOS.

This is a real problem, but when I complain about it I get told to just "hide the icons you don't care about" as if that's a solution.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346079

Especially bad for people with poor eyesight who have to use the display scaling set toward "Large Text" instead of "Default" or "More Space"

Between the larger display scaling, losing space to the notch, and the IT department setting up new computers with 8 little pieces of preinstalled bullshit up there, Apple's perspective on this seems to be "if the Ivanti VPN menu extra disappears I guess you didn't really need that anyway!"

Having the sound, bluetooth, wifi, and other system stuff removed from the bar and accessible in control center helps, but is not sufficient.

They're too busy solving important problems like "how can I use part of my screen as a videoconferencing light source" and chasing yearly iOS new feature parity to deal with pesky things like menu extras. It's only been 25 years since OS X came out.

Poor eyesight? How about just being over 45?

My visual acuity at distance has not changed from when I was 20. My ability to read tiny, poorly-contrasted text at phone distance has.

Enlarging text size is a massive benefit to everyone as we age. It’s one of the reasons that older readers were among the first to adopt e-ink readers and tablets: every book suddenly becomes a large-print book. In the world of accessibility this is one of the easiest things to do with one of the largest impacts. Not everyone is blind, not everyone is hard of hearing, but everyone gets presbyopia if they live long enough.

>the IT department setting up new computers with 8 little pieces of preinstalled bullshit up there

You can usually toggle hide on the pre installed bullshit at least. It would be helpful if there was a notification or prompt to tell you the menu bar was full so you know to do that.

I struggled with disappearing icons (like our company VPN client - which wasn't tailscale by the way) thinking the app was somehow "stuck". I would go kill the app, restart machine etc - during restart it would get fixed "automatically" by being an app earlier in the order!

Took me months to figure out it was running afterall and just hidden by the notch.

How hard is for apple to move the "least used icons" to a fold? (but still accessible)

I would love to get a Windows-like overlay which collects all those damn menu icons. The least Apple should do is giving developers proper APIs to build that, but instead Tahoe broke so many menu bar managers it's not funny anymore. Ice, Sanebar, Bartender,... none of them work reliably.

You can hold command and drag the icons under the notch to make the invisible ones eventually show

> If the programs you’re using refuse to let you remove those icons (or they keep re-adding them against your wishes) then those programs are bad citizens and you should probably stop using them!

I always love these types of arguments. Program does one thing bad so stop getting value of out it. lol.

If you're visually impaired, you can hit it even with just a few icons on a 14" laptop. Fonts anything other than tiny + overloaded menus + even a handful of app icons means I always hit this unless I'm docked.

Hacky menu bar modification tools are basically an accessibility requirement for me, and my vision isn't even that bad. (Best corrected is 20/30 or 20/40 or so.) People with serious impairments are totally screwed by this on macOS, sometimes even with large external monitors.

Yes, it's terrible and something even Windows handles better. It's one of those utterly bizarre Apple things which make me wonder which old product guy has dirt on everyone else at the company.

Just take Ice's source and have Claude whip you up the features you want. Keep it to yourself. Takes an afternoon and doesn't have other people calling you a sloplogist.

https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice

It was Windows 7 when Microsoft added an overflow for tray icons, not XP.

Not true. XP had a feature to set each icon to always show, “automatically,” or never. Will send you screenshots if you demand them, when I get home to my XP ThinkPad.

It's documented here: https://umidevi.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-make-windows-xp-...

It's not even an edge case. It should have been considered an inevitable case.

Really depressing design dereliction and/or incompetence.

Yeah, I was surprised that something this obvious wasn't addressed.

Investing in a visual redesign (Liquid Glass) but not an obvious UX issue of the notch hiding icons seems like a mis-prioritization.

It is ! I’m “solving” it with an app called bartender. It’s hacked and sometimes doesn’t work but was the only way I could manage this problem…

Apple software sucks so bad!

I use an app called BarBee for this. I heard great things about bartender as well. There are a few other decent options. But, yeah, the bottom line is, it's kind of crazy how Apple did not think about this, about the overcrowding of the menu bar and implement an auto-collapse mechanism or something like that.

The true short-sightedness Apple has had becomes really obvious in the latest liquid glass UI, whatever the fuck that is called. It's a grand fuck to a decent-looking UI that existed before that.

With some apps, I can't remember if tailscale is one I don't think so but another vpn we use is, it's even worse because opening them only creates the menubar icon. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out why the vpn wouldn't start before I realised it was just hidden. No feedback at all

Useful menu bar manager for Mac that lets you hide multiple icons behind a single icon: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice

I’m on mobile so don’t have the link handy but there’s a fork called Thaw that has been getting frequent updates

Oh! Thanks for that, I hadn't realized Ice's maintainer had stopped working on it: https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw

I had been using Hidden Bar but gonna give Thaw a shot now. Looks a bit more full featured and under active development!

https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden

KDE has it included!

Ewww, it's free and opensource!

I’ve been using this for years. It’s simple and works perfectly: https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden

I stumbled across TailScale while I asked ClaudeAI regarding switching off of VPN: I wasnt aware of the tool.

Im "shocked" how perfect it functions! It worked out of the box for a fairly simple but old windows setup where I could apply it: Everything was perfectly fine, super user friendly in the beginning.

Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer

> Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer

I do exactly this! I keep Tailscale running my family's shared iMac, making it easy for me to remotely connect to it and screen share if necessary to help. I went a more complicated route[0] and installed Tailscale as a system background daemon that runs as root and starts up before the first user login. Which also means no GUI interface, so more protected from user error.

[0] https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/wiki/Tailscaled-on-ma... (the standalone variant is also entirely opensource, unlike their macOS GUI app)

> installed Tailscale as a system background daemon

On Windows Server this was done somehow automaticly the last time I installed it: So access is possible after the machine is booted

That was the beauty that caught me: It just worked out of the box, not any SSL certificate stuff signing issues etc. And the funny thing: I really didnt know it existed before the AI told me about it :-))

The "apps" that appear in the menu bar are called Menu Bar Extras. They are supposed to be an optional UI to provide quick access to functions of regular applications that are not running in the foreground.

They aren't supposed to be the entire app or the only way to interact with something.

> We’re working on a comparable UI for Windows devices

As a Linux user and fan of good GUI apps, it always bums me out I'm stuck with the CLI-only options for apps like Tailscale. Even for a simple tray icon I have to resort to buggy GNOME extensions.

I understand the fragmented ecosystem and small user-base on the desktop Linux side make it hard to justify, but I hope that changes one day!

this may have been what you were referring to with “ buggy GNOME extensions”, but in case it wasn’t:

https://tailscale.com/docs/features/client/linux-systray

It wasn't actually! I've been using a third party extension that tries to provide a similar tray icon (after moving from a different extension that doesn't support my version of GNOME) but it's really flaky. I'll try this. Thanks for the tip.

Re: buggy GNOME extensions, it drives me nuts that GNOME has no built in support for menu bar icons/app indicators.

There's a whole class of GUI apps that should run in the background until needed, and GNOME just has no solution here. I really don't get why they removed this functionality.

I don't want a "service" model where you start/stop gui apps via systemd. And I don't want to keep a window around for no good reason.

GNOME 44 has built-in support finally, but they're hidden in the quick settings menu. I prefer having them in the tray so I can see if they're running without having to click around.

Ironically, I have trouble with Tailscale and Mac SSO. I setup my tailnet with Apple SSO and when I want to connect on my non Windows device there is not an easy way to add a new user and the new user has their own tailnet. I wish I could just use tailscale with a passkey without using third party sso.

https://tailscale.com/docs/integrations/identity/passkeys

Apple should solve this. Windows got a little menu that can popup this can't be that hard

They might be out of courage.

Isn't it true that Apple just prefers apps not use the menu bar in the first place? I'm not sure where I had read that, but it might explain why Apple doesn't improve the menu bar. Personally I'm of the opinion that they should improve it because the current situation is untenable.

But am I misremembering this?

Yes, it was a huge mistake to allow any random app developer to claim such a prominent and limited piece of screen real estate. But it’s been an option for so long now that everyone will scream bloody murder if they try take it away.

Apple’s opinion seems to be: running out of space happens to only a few people running tons of menu-bar-loving apps, so if you are dorky enough to run into this problem, you should be dorky enough to solve it yourself.

Not exactly, though many apps violate Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for macOS menu bar extras[1]:

Let people — not your app — decide whether to put your menu bar extra in the menu bar. Typically, people add a menu bar extra to the menu bar by changing a setting in an app’s settings window. To ensure discoverability, however, consider giving people the option of doing so during setup.

Avoid relying on the presence of menu bar extras. The system hides and shows menu bar extras regularly, and you can’t be sure which other menu bar extras people have chosen to display or predict the location of your menu bar extra.

Consider exposing app-specific functionality in other ways, too. For example, you can provide a Dock menu that appears when people Control-click your app’s Dock icon. People can hide or choose not to use your menu bar extra, but a Dock menu is aways available when your app is running.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

This feels like one of those bugs that sounds niche until you put a work Mac through the usual gauntlet of VPN, MDM, chat, calendar, backup, and whatever else corp IT adds. Not catastrophic, but it is kind of wild that macOS still has no first party overflow affordance for menu bar icons.

“We don’t have any control over where things get rendered in the menu bar,” said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless so as to share their honest opinion. “You just say, ‘I want to be a menu bar app.’ They shove it up there, and that’s it, you end up where you end up.”

> said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless

Fear in a free society? There’s no contradiction here. A free society doesn't create a fearless society. Because freedom is the freedom to amass property. If you are not in that class of capital owners your fear is justified. Class society.

I thought it was just Tailscale trying to style their blogpost into a news article.

It's a joke...

I love Tailscale so much and when I got added to what may have been an A/B test for the windowed app, I was even happier with it. It's a great improvement.

Menu items are so convenient.

Apple should let users double the menu bar height. Put the app menus, user name, current time and search along the bottom. A text only bar would look coherent.

Then put menu bar items on the row above. Default from right, but let users move items to the left.

I use hiding menu bar and dock. Dynamic Wallpaper toggles desktop files/widgets visibility. So my Mac's resting face is, and would remain, completely uncluttered.

> no options to rearrange the menu bar items

This, at least, is not correct. Hold down Command and drag an icon to rearrange the order.

I think they mean developers have no way of requesting or specifying order.

Long experience with Window Taskbar icons has demonstrated you should not give developers that sort of control, only users.

I always assumed the justification for the notch would be FaceID on Macs. However, it’s been many generations and we still don’t see it.

I don't see what this has to do with the notch. There's limited space in the menu bar. The overflow is hidden with or without the notch.

It is a bit weird that Apple hasn't provided a simple UI indicator that some icons are hidden. All that's needed is a dot with a tooltip that opens the settings to configure the menu icons.

I always change my screen resolution to avoid the notch on my Mac. It's non-obvious how to do this but you end up with a slightly shorter resolution than the default.

I know this means I'm wasting potential pixels, and wasting all the engineer effort that went into the nearly bezel-free design, but worth it IMHO.

I really dislike how apps add themselves to the menubar. And I hate if there's no option to remove it from the menubar. Icons with indicators like WiFi, Battery, etc. make sense. But if an app does not need an indicator like that, just add the capabilities to the Dock icon!

Moving from a menu bar app to a proper window is a bold call. Menu bar was convenient for "set it and forget it" but terrible for anything beyond toggling on/off. Curious if they'll keep the menu bar icon as a quick shortcut or kill it entirely.

From the article:

> As we noted at its September beta release, a windowed version of Tailscale’s macOS app doesn’t replace the menu bar app, but runs alongside it. It can be pulled up from the Dock or a Spotlight search, and makes a lot of Tailscale data and features more accessible.

i love that they posted a snippet of Swift code showing other developers how to detect this themselves!

I use https://apps.apple.com/at/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066 Hidden Bar to workaround the menu bar problem.

The new window is nice and useful, but I find the window’s header to be on the very thick side.

Nowadays, that whole header should probably leave in the sidebar itself, and the sidebar could probably be more "Liquid Glass"-like.

I’ve been using Bartender (paid) and Thaw (free) to manage my menu bar. Recently, both apps have become quite buggy. I’m not sure whether this is due to macOS or if there are better alternatives I’m not aware of.

I feel like every app I use has gotten buggier in Tahoe, I suppose major UI rewrites will do that.

> Apple, a company that traditionally favors simple functionality

but not being able to interact with an icon is DISfunctionality, though yes, a simple one. So that principle can't explain the bad design either.

Anyone know if this new windowed Tailscale view is enabled on the non-App Store version?

I guess I'll find out soon enough once I update, but I didn't see any specific callout in the article.

Yes it is

Back in the Mac OS X public beta days (and maybe even into 10.0–10.1?), apps that are nowadays shoved into the menu at used to live in the Dock. I kinda think I prefer that.

The only reason I used Tailscale's menubar applet was to change exit nodes, I definitely don't need a whole UI.

Guess I'll just stick with CLI only for now (via darwin-nix)

My only workaround with the stupid notch is to connect it to an external screen which is wider than my 16inch macbook pro so that I can access those apps

The hidden notch issue is a pretty big problem. I had to look for tools to shrink the width spacing just to survive, and it just looks bad

Yes! More windowed interfaces! I hate apps that outgrow a modal. I hate losing the context. No wait I think I hate all modals.

Mullvad, your turn next please

As a workaround, can Tailscale internally add multiple menu items and keep adding until one reports as visible?

would love to be able to run two accounts (two tailnets) on my MBP. Haven't figured out a good solution.

This is all cool, but to allow ssh access I still need to install tailscale through brew?

i don't get it.

I use Tailscale from the App Store. To allow SSH access I simply turn on the Apple-preinstalled SSH daemon.

I really thought this was going to be an Apple acquires Tailscale post

I personally found it confusing and un-Mac-like that quitting the configuration app also now stops the Tailscale service. It was unfortunate to discover this while I was AFK.

My recommendation is to rethink it to work like apps like 1Password, Default Folder, Keyboard Maestro, Ice, etc., where I can always easily open a configuration app, but the service must be intentionally/knowingly quit via either the configuration app or the menu bar utility.

TLDR: Please separate the service from the new configuration app.

This was driving me nuts but at some point very recently they added a "Hide Dock Icon" to settings.

I don't understand why people are still using Tailscale after the issue they had where two independent tunnels were connected together.

Never heard of it, could you send us a reference? What do you use instead?

I use almost plain old wireguard, hosting a wg-easy container that has a nice web gui wrapper that makes it easy with QR codes, no configuration files to create like just wireguard. It's the technology that Tailscale uses, so why would you complicate it, adding more risk?

The incident seems like it was never exploited, and it was fixed within 24 hours. However, in my opinion, the fact that this COULD happen, let alone that id DID happen, is too much risk, and why I switched immediately after hearing about it.

AI overview of the incident:

TS-2023-001:

Node Sharing Across Tailnets Without Authorization (January 2023) A bug in Tailscale's node sharing logic allowed the creation of sharing invitations by unauthorized users. A malicious individual who knew a target node's database ID could generate and accept a sharing invite for that node without being an admin of the target node's tailnet — for any node in any tailnet. Circl So in practice, a node from one unrelated tailnet could be pulled into another person's tailnet without the owner's consent. A node's ID is only visible in the API or admin console, by admins of either the node's tailnet or a tailnet to which that node has already been shared Circl — which limited exploitability, since you'd need to already know the target's internal database ID (a random 64-bit integer, not easily guessable). Tailscale fixed it server-side on 2023-01-12 and stated they verified it was never exploited. The bug reporter (Benjamin Roberts, HN user tsujamin) noted it was discovered accidentally while managing their own tailnet. The Hacker News thread praised Tailscale for deploying a fix within 24 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34420142

TS-2024-002:

ACL Overwrites Across Tailnets (May 2023 – July 2024) There's also a second related incident that's perhaps even more alarming in concept: an admin user could overwrite the ACLs of one tailnet with ACLs from another tailnet. Any user who was an Admin in multiple tailnets and edited ACLs in the admin console between May 22, 2023 and July 17th, 2024 could trigger this bug after switching the active tailnet. Tailscale This one involved the tailnet-switching feature in the admin console accidentally "bleeding" policy configuration between separate, unrelated tailnets.

There's so much tailscale shilling on hn and if you say anything neutral you're voted down.

Being a principled, critical thinker sure has its costs these days. Yeah, that's right, I said it. Flag me (lol).

It was way worse before AI

tailscale offers many good things.

for example "tailscale" drop for free, share files between devices on your network

also https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel which is cloudflare tunnel alternative, no more localtunnel or other things

so i am not surprized people like it as product, most good features are free.

Had very high hopes for tailscale drop but it’s worked literally once of the 7 times I tried to use it before I stopped trying.

Mostly machines on the same network.

I use a wallpaper with a horizontal black bar at the top to make the notch invisible, so this catches me off guard pretty often.

yesterday i setup tailscale on a gcp VM.

i enabled route advertising and managed to ping my google cloud instances using tailscale

problem is the packet loss rate is high. SSH tunnel worked!

soo i think there is something wrong with tailscale

Tailscale is really losing the plot to the movie.

It is an app that sits in the background and provides connectivity. Occasionally you need to change a setting. Absolutely nobody wants a rich windowed UI, or a menu bar widget that drops down a complex detail card.

I hope they can see this is exactly what killed desktop anti-virus: something that was supposed to be quietly doing its job in the background started getting in the users way. It needed to poke its head up and scream "hey remember me?" at the behest of some product managers or growth hackers. Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.

I feel like you don’t use tailscale. Because I use it every day - and I get confused when I can’t find it.

I have too many toolbar icons, so I do actually want the window to switch to so I can copy and paste IP addresses. I already keep it open so I can just command-tab to the window, and it's way better this way.

I use tailscale every single day.

You're the one losing the plot. It's optional, still closes to the system tray without you explicitly docking it. It doesn't emerge at random like McAfee.

> Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.

So Apple are going to bake Tailscale into the OS? Also, read the blog. It's a response to Apple's bad user experience.

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