#Why a cutout instead of a bezel
Before 2021, MacBook displays stopped well short of the lid's edge, the top bezel existed almost entirely to house the webcam. When Apple redesigned the MacBook Pro that year, it pushed the display to within a few millimetres of the edges. A camera still has to live somewhere, and lids are too thin for under-display cameras that don't look terrible. The result: keep the camera, cut the display around it.
The trade Apple made is easy to miss: the panel got taller, not smaller. The 16″ is 1800×1169 points, the classic 16:10 workspace would be 1800×1125. Those extra 44 rows are new real estate, and the menu bar moved up into them. The notch sits in space you never had before.
#What's inside the housing
Three things, and fewer than most people assume:
- A 1080p FaceTime HD camera, the notch's whole reason to exist.
- An ambient light sensor, drives auto-brightness and True Tone.
- The camera indicator LED: hardware-wired to the camera's power, which is why it can't be disabled in software.
Notably absent: Face ID. There's no TrueDepth projector or infrared array in any MacBook to date, Apple's position has been that Touch ID in the power button covers the Mac. The notch is not secretly future-proofing for it either, as far as anyone has demonstrated by teardown.
#The hardware inside, component by component
Each of those three parts earned its place in a strip of lid only a few millimetres deep.
The 1080p FaceTime HD camera. The headline resident and the reason the notch exists at all. Pre-notch MacBooks shipped a 720p camera that was routinely the weakest part of a video call; the 1080p sensor more than doubled the pixel count and runs its image pipeline through the M-series chip. Still a laptop camera in a thin lid, but the jump was visible on the first call.
The ambient light sensor. The quiet one. It reads the light falling on the display and drives two features: auto-brightness and True Tone, which shifts the panel's white point to match the room. It sits in the notch because that spot always faces you, unobstructed, whenever the lid is open.
The camera indicator LED. The most interesting engineering decision of the three. The green light is hardware-wired to the camera's power: if the sensor has power, the LED is lit. No firmware flag, no API and no setting can turn the camera on while keeping the light off. NotchBay mirrors camera and microphone activity into the notch as a status chip, and I built that feature knowing the LED is the deeper guarantee: my chip is software, the LED is a circuit.
Just as telling is what is not in there. The microphones live in the chassis, not the lid. There is no infrared hardware and no Face ID, which deserves its own section.
#Why not Face ID on Mac
The question I hear most about the notch: the iPhone's cutout unlocks the phone, so why doesn't the Mac's? The honest answer has three parts.
Depth. Face ID is not a camera feature, it is a TrueDepth module: an infrared camera, a flood illuminator and a dot projector working together. Those parts need physical depth that a phone body offers and a MacBook lid, a few millimetres of aluminium and glass, does not. Of the explanations on offer, this one best matches the hardware.
Posture. Apple's public reasoning has been that on a laptop your hands already rest on the keyboard, so Touch ID in the power button is the lower-friction unlock. Having used both daily, I think that argument mostly holds.
The Watch. Apple Watch unlock already gives Mac owners a hands-free path, which quietly removes much of the demand Face ID would answer.
Will it ever come? Face ID-on-Mac patents and rumours resurface most years. I treat all of it as speculation, and you should too: no shipping MacBook contains TrueDepth hardware, no teardown has found space reserved for it, and Apple has said nothing. The notch you own today holds exactly the three components above.
#How macOS treats the notch
macOS handles the cutout with a few quiet rules:
- The menu bar wraps around it: menu items flow to its left, status items to its right. Items that don't fit simply don't render.
- Fullscreen apps drop below it: the system letterboxes to the classic 16:10 frame, so video never renders around the cutout.
- The pointer slides behind it, the notch area behaves like dead space to the cursor.
- Developers get APIs (NSScreen.safeAreaInsets and the auxiliary top areas) to lay out around it precisely, the same APIs we used to measure every notch dimension.
#What the space is genuinely good for
Apple leaves the notch region alone. But it's the most stable pixel real estate on the machine: always visible, never covered by windows, dead centre of your eyeline. That's exactly the job the iPhone's Dynamic Island does, live status that doesn't steal focus.
A small ecosystem of Mac apps now puts it to work: NotchBay turns it into live activities (music, meetings, AirPods, call controls), a clipboard tray and on-device dictation; open-source boring.notch and commercial tools like NotchNook and Alcove each take their own angle. We compared them all in the 2026 roundup.
#Timeline: every notched Mac
The cutout has now outlived four chip generations without changing shape. The full list:
- 2021: MacBook Pro 14″ and 16″ (M1 Pro, M1 Max). The redesign that introduced the notch.
- 2022: MacBook Air 13″ (M2). The notch reaches the Air as the wedge design retires.
- 2023: MacBook Pro 14″ and 16″ (M2 Pro, M2 Max), MacBook Air 15″ (M2), then MacBook Pro 14″ and 16″ (M3 family) late in the year.
- 2024: MacBook Air 13″ and 15″ (M3), then MacBook Pro 14″ and 16″ (M4 family), which stepped the camera up to 12MP Center Stage.
- 2025: MacBook Air 13″ and 15″ (M4).
The last notch-less MacBook Apple sold was the 13″ MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar, which left the lineup in 2023. In my testing of the notch geometry for NotchBay, the proportions have held steady since day one: 220×38 points on the 16″ Pro, 185×32 points on the 14″, about 12.2% of the display's width on both. Every dimension is in the measured notch-size post.
#Frequently asked questions
Does the MacBook notch have Face ID?
No. It contains a 1080p camera, an ambient light sensor and the camera LED. No MacBook has TrueDepth hardware, unlocking stays with Touch ID and Apple Watch.
Why didn't Apple just make the bezel thinner and keep the camera above the screen?
A camera above the display would force a taller lid or a thick top bezel. The cutout lets the display panel extend into the camera's row: you get more screen, not less.
Does the notch hide things in my menu bar?
It can. macOS hides menu bar items that would collide with the cutout instead of overlapping them. Menu-bar managers or trimming status items solves it.
Which Macs have a notch?
Every MacBook Pro since the 2021 14″/16″ redesign and every MacBook Air since the 2022 M2 redesign. Desktop displays (Studio Display, Pro Display XDR) have no notch.
Can you turn off the green camera light?
No. The LED is hardware-wired to the camera's power, so whenever the sensor has power the light is on. No setting, API or firmware flag separates the two, which is the point: it is a privacy guarantee, not a bug.
Will Apple add Face ID to the MacBook?
Nobody outside Apple knows. Rumours and patents resurface most years, but no shipping MacBook contains TrueDepth hardware, and Apple's public position has been that Touch ID suits a laptop because your hands are already on the keyboard. Treat every prediction as speculation.
Are all MacBook notches the same size?
Close, but not identical. The 16″ MacBook Pro's notch measures 220×38 points and the 14″ measures 185×32 points, about 12.2% of the display's width on both. The proportions have not changed since 2021.
