My new MacBook Air doesn't have a "notch"

There is a hidden resolution setting on the new-style MacBooks that ignores the notch area of the screen altogether. It results in displaying the menubar below the notch. If you turn your brightness up all the way on your MacBook Air, you'll see that the area around the notch will be more visible and lit up. It's there, but it's just showing black pixels, since it is not an OLED screen.

There are a small number of apps that can enable (and therefore disable) this hidden resolution. However, I imagine that if you go into your Display settings and change the resolution to the standard resolution of 1710x1107, the issue will be corrected.

If it's truly a new 15" MacBook Air, it has a notch at the middle top of the screen. This is where the camera is located, FYI.

The 13" MacBook Air with the M1 processor does not have a notch.

Both the 13" MacBook Air M2 and 15" MacBook Air M2 models do have the notch.

Here you can see all three MacBook Airs: MacBook Air - Apple

Note this is not a notch in the laptop itself...it's simply a portion of the upper middle part of the screen where the camera is.

See if a newly-created user has the same misbehavior, when you log into that.

...This tends to isolate user-local settings and apps.

See if booting into Safe Mode shows the same misbehavior.

...This tends to isolate (most) system-wide settings and apps.

Very strange, indeed! Seeing the TinkerTool app on your desktop, I am wondering if it has something to do with what I'm seeing. I know the app changes system settings (and some of those changes probably aren't sanctioned by Apple, explaining why they aren't on the App Store)...so I can only speculate it has something to do with this?

Maybe someone else will jump in here and shed more light on this.

You can't get rid of the hardware "notch" – but there are ways to try to hide it.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-hide-the-notch-on-the-macbook-pro-and-macbook-air/

Possibly with some of these methods, the computer would not include the very top of the (actual) display area in screen snapshots, and so you wouldn't see a "notch" in them. Taking a digital photo of the screen and looking at the photo closely (for the camera, or for a "black bar" at the top of the screen) might reveal what was actually happening.

Given that your MacBook Air is most likely less than a month old, and doesn't ship from the factory "sans notch", what we're seeing has to be the result of an application you've installed on it.

Please share with the rest of us which application it is, please. :)

Mike Osborn wrote:

Please share with the rest of us which application it is, please. :)

jwmurrayjr wrote:

I'm not using "Top Notch" or any other Menu bar altering software (that I know of).

The article to which I linked mentioned a couple of cases in which macOS itself might "hide" the notch. One involved using full-screen mode (not guaranteed to work consistently). Another involved ticking a box in an application's Get Info dialog to tell the OS to "Scale [it] to fit below built-in camera."

I'm truly puzzled by this one, then.

Have you tried launching the Photo Booth app to see if it works properly? This would reveal where the camera is, as the camera's green light would appear when it's active. (Same thing with FaceTime).

The only thing I can surmise is that there's an app on your MBA that actually reduces the screen to a point just below the bottom of the notch...which would, of course, make you think you don't have a notch.

Yes...the notch is at the same height as the menu bar. So, something is reducing your screen size to just below the notch. What that something is, though, is a mystery to me. You're actually losing a tiny bit of display size since everything is below the notch on your MBA.

This is what the display on this MacBook Air should look like:

It sure seems to me like some kind of system setting add-in (third party) at work here. But you're saying you don't have anything like that installed, which is why I'm at a loss.

(Honestly can't understand why anyone would be THAT bothered by the notch to develop anything that "shrinks" the screen to avoid it...but maybe that's just me.)