Apple’s notch ‘fix’ brings fat bezels back to the MacBook Pro

A new support document released yesterday details a “Scale to fit below built-in camera” option in macOS that will forcibly scale apps to only use the display below the notch. It’s a temporary workaround for apps that don’t currently play nice with the notch on Apple’s new MacBook Pros.

The camera notch cutout on Apple’s latest laptops was meant to enable a more expansive edge-to-edge screen. But as we saw yesterday, owners of the new MacBook Pro models have seen both apps and the OS misbehave, whereby app menus and status bar items can get hidden under the camera cutout. The scale-to-fit workaround fixes this, but results in the type of large bezels the notch was meant to negate.

The scaling feature was demonstrated by artist @Jatodaro on Twitter, showing how checking the box for ‘Scale to fit below built-in camera’ in an app’s Get Info window will shrink the display for all apps. The full-sized display (with notch) will only return if either the app is closed or if the box is unchecked.

Apple also mentions in the support document that this scaling feature will disappear once developers update their apps to deal with the notch correctly.