Full screen apps on a notched MacBook: the black band explained

In full screen, a notched MacBook blacks out the strip beside the notch and hides the menu bar. Why it happens, what you can change, and what video looks like.

27 October 20267 min read

Put an app in full screen on a MacBook with a notch and two things happen. The window moves down so that it sits entirely below the notch, and the strip on either side of the notch turns black, so the notch disappears into a plain black band across the top of the screen. The menu bar goes too, until you push the pointer against the top edge, when it slides back into that band.

Nothing is broken, and you are not losing any of the screen you would normally work in. This post covers why macOS does it, how to get in and out of full screen quickly, what you can change about the menu bar, and what to expect from video.

Why the strip beside the notch goes black

The screen on a notched MacBook is a little taller than it looks. The main part of the display has the usual 16:10 shape, and the strip above it, the part the notch cuts into, is extra. That strip is where the menu bar lives. Take the 14-inch MacBook Pro: its built-in display has a native resolution of 3024 by 1964 pixels. A 16:10 screen that wide would be 1890 pixels tall, and the 74 pixels left over are the menu bar strip. To see your own Mac's numbers, hold Option, open the Apple menu, choose System Information, and look under Graphics/Displays.

In a normal window, the menu bar fills that strip and works around the notch: menus on the left, status icons on the right. In full screen, macOS gives the app the whole 16:10 area below the notch and blacks out the strip beside it, so no corner of your document, slide or film ends up behind the camera. The notch is black and the strip is now black, so the edge between them vanishes. For a lot of people, full screen is when they notice the notch least. If you would like it to fade the rest of the time too, can you hide the notch on a MacBook goes through the options, from wallpapers to a per-app setting.

Getting in and out of full screen

There are a few ways in:

Click the green button at the top left of a window. In recent versions of macOS, resting the pointer on it shows a menu with full screen and tiling options.
In many apps, choose View > Enter Full Screen.
Press Control-Command-F, or Globe-F on keyboards with a Globe key.

To get out, press the same shortcut again, press Escape in many apps (video players especially), or move the pointer to the top of the screen so that the menu bar and the window's buttons slide down, then click the green button.

Each full screen app gets its own space, beside your desktop, rather than sitting in a window on top of it. Swipe left or right with three or four fingers on the trackpad, depending on how your gestures are set in System Settings > Trackpad, or press Control with the Left or Right Arrow key, to move between them. Mission Control (Control and the Up Arrow, or swipe up) shows every desktop and full screen app in a row along the top of the screen.

By default the menu bar hides while an app is full screen and comes back when you move the pointer to the very top of the screen. On a notched MacBook it reappears in the black band, around the notch, then hides again when you move away. Some apps also slide their toolbar down with it.

You can change this. In macOS Sonoma and Sequoia, open System Settings > Control Center and find "Automatically hide and show the menu bar". The choices are:

Setting	What it does
Always	Hides the menu bar on the desktop and in full screen
On Desktop Only	Hides it on the desktop, keeps it visible in full screen
In Full Screen Only	The usual default: visible on the desktop, hidden in full screen
Never	Keeps it visible everywhere

If you would like the clock, the battery and your menus to stay put while you work in full screen, choose On Desktop Only or Never. On a notched MacBook the menu bar then sits in the strip beside the notch, which would otherwise be black, so the app keeps its full area.

This setting has moved between versions of macOS. If it is not under Control Center on your Mac, type "menu bar" into the search field at the top of System Settings and it should come up.

Video in full screen

When you watch a video in full screen, the picture is fitted to the area below the notch, so the notch never covers part of the frame. Most video is wider than the screen's 16:10 shape, so you also get black bars above and below the picture, bigger for widescreen films than for TV shows. On a notched MacBook the bar at the top merges with the black band around the notch, and the top of the screen reads as one plain strip of black.

There are two kinds of full screen video, and they behave slightly differently:

The app goes full screen. In the TV app or QuickTime Player, the green button or the full screen shortcut puts the whole player in its own space.
The video goes full screen. In Safari, the full screen button inside a web video player takes just the video full screen, without the page around it. Escape brings you back to the page.

Most apps keep clear of the notch in full screen without any help. If an older app or a game puts something important behind it, look in Finder: select the app in Applications, choose File > Get Info, and if you see "Scale to fit below built-in camera", turn it on. The app then keeps its content clear of the notch, even outside full screen.

Full screen on an external display

If your MacBook is connected to a display, full screen happens on whichever screen the window is on. External displays have no notch, so there is no black band: the app fills the screen and the menu bar hides as usual. Each display can show its own full screen app as long as "Displays have separate Spaces" is turned on in System Settings > Desktop & Dock, which it is unless someone has changed it.

Why Notchpals stays quiet in full screen

Notchpals is a Mac app whose characters peek out of the notch to remind you to drink water, rest your eyes, stand up or get to bed. A visit means the island at the top of the screen opening and a character sliding down with a speech bubble. In full screen, that would land on top of whatever you have just given the whole screen to: a film, a slideshow, a game, a long stretch of writing.

So the crew does not visit. Whenever the app in front has gone full screen on the screen the characters use, Notchpals stays quiet, and the pair of eyes it shows in the menu bar closes. Once you leave full screen, the crew can visit again when a moment fits. Start a film in full screen in the evening and a Sleep character like Boo won't float into the middle of it. Timed moments still keep to their window, though, so if you come out of full screen in the hour before your bedtime, it might say something like this:

Boo, Sleep: **Wind down**, about an hour before your bedtime

A few details are useful to know:

It's the notch's screen that counts. When a MacBook's own notched screen is open, the characters use it even if another display is the main one. A full screen app on the external display leaves the notch free, so the crew can still visit there.
Watching in a window often counts as being away. The crew also waits while you are away, which Notchpals takes to mean no keyboard or mouse for 2 minutes. Sit back with a film in an ordinary window and that usually happens by itself.
Calls are covered separately. If an app has the mic or camera on, the crew stays in, whether that app is full screen or not.
It does not detect screen sharing or Focus modes. If you are about to present from a window rather than in full screen, pause the crew from the menu bar for 1 hour or until tomorrow morning.

There are also at least 20 minutes between visits the crew starts on its own, so coming out of full screen after a long film does not set off a burst of them. How the crew decides when to speak, and when not to, is the subject of reminders that know when not to remind you.

A quick reference

Full screen on or off: Control-Command-F, or Globe-F.
Leave a full screen video: Escape.
Move between full screen apps: swipe sideways with three or four fingers, or Control and an arrow key.
See every space at once: Mission Control, Control and the Up Arrow.
Keep the menu bar visible in full screen: System Settings > Control Center, "Automatically hide and show the menu bar", On Desktop Only or Never.
An app that hides things behind the notch: Finder > Get Info > "Scale to fit below built-in camera", if offered.

Once you know the black band is deliberate, full screen on a notched MacBook is one of the nicer ways to work: one thing on screen, the notch out of sight, and the crew waiting until you come back.