Applies to macOS 27 Golden Gate, with notes on upgrading from macOS 26 Tahoe and macOS 15 Sequoia
The short answer: macOS 27 draws the whole menu bar as one window instead of one small window per icon. That is why every icon-hiding utility, Bartender, Ice, Thaw, Hidden Bar, Barbee, Sane Bar and Glow, stopped working the day the first beta shipped. Apple added an overflow arrow of its own, Bartender, Thaw and Brow have since found workarounds, Ice has not. The menu bar’s look is a separate matter: it is still painted over your wallpaper, as it has been since Tahoe, and the fixes for an unreadable bar are the same three Apple switches as before plus, if you want an actual color, an app that paints one. Those apps broke too, for a different reason: Golden Gate also removed the screenshot call they used to grab the wallpaper before painting on it, and it fails silently, so the app looks like it is running and nothing happens. Boring Old Menu Bar 1.28 did exactly that; version 1.29 renders from the wallpaper file instead and works. TopNotch, which almost certainly used the same call, stopped working and its developer has promised an update.
A disclosure before we start: I’m the developer of Boring Old Menu Bar, a small paid utility that gives the menu bar a solid color. It does not hide icons, so if that is your problem, most of this page sends you elsewhere. The two problems get mixed up constantly in forum threads, which is the main reason this page exists.
What Apple changed in the macOS 27 menu bar
macOS 27 Golden Gate was announced on 8 June 2026 and released on 14 September 2026. Four things about the menu bar are different from macOS 26 Tahoe:
- The bar is one window. From Big Sur through Tahoe, every status item on the right-hand side of the bar was its own tiny window, and third-party managers found those windows and shoved them around or off screen. Golden Gate renders the entire menu bar as a single window. There is nothing left to find. This is the change behind every “my menu bar app broke” thread.
- There is a built-in overflow arrow. When the bar runs out of room, or icons would end up behind the notch on a MacBook, macOS now collapses the surplus behind an arrow at the edge of the bar. Click it and the hidden icons appear. You do not get to choose which ones go.
- The Liquid Glass setting became a slider. macOS 26.1’s two-way Clear / Tinted choice is replaced by a slider under System Settings › Appearance › Liquid Glass, from fully transparent to opaque, for the whole interface.
- Apple silicon only. Golden Gate does not run on Intel Macs, and Rosetta 2 is no longer installed by default. Any Intel-only menu bar utility is gone for good on this system.
- The desktop screenshot call is gone. This one got no coverage because it broke a different, smaller family of apps: the ones that hide the notch or color the bar by painting a strip onto your wallpaper. Through Tahoe they took a screenshot of the desktop, painted the strip, and set the result as the wallpaper. On Golden Gate that call returns nothing and raises no error, so the app sits in the menu bar doing nothing. Boring Old Menu Bar 1.28 and, by every sign, TopNotch were hit; the fix is to render the wallpaper from its file instead, which is what Boring Old Menu Bar 1.29 does.
What did not change: the bar still has no background of its own. Tahoe removed it, Golden Gate keeps it removed, and the menu titles still float over whatever the top of your wallpaper happens to be, with macOS choosing white or black text from the picture’s brightness. The Show menu bar background switch under System Settings › Menu Bar is still there, and so is Reduce transparency under Accessibility.
Why your menu bar manager stopped working
Bartender, Ice, Thaw, Hidden Bar, Barbee, Sane Bar and Glow all did the same thing underneath: locate each status item’s window and move it. Apple never documented that, it just happened to work for fifteen years. In macOS 27 the per-item windows are gone, so on beta 1 every one of these apps either showed all your icons or showed nothing. Nobody’s app was uniquely badly written; the foundation moved.
The ones that work again do so through new, equally undocumented tricks. BetterTouchTool’s developer found the first one within days, a “Load Menu Bar Layout” action that swaps between saved arrangements, and shared the approach; Bartender’s Golden Gate beta uses the same idea. Brow takes a different route, screenshotting the bar and working out which strip belongs to which icon. All of them say the same thing in their release notes: Apple could close the door again in any point update.
Which menu bar managers work on macOS 27
As of early October 2026. Check the developer’s own page on the day you upgrade; this table will age.
| App | Status on macOS 27 | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Bartender 7 | Works, Golden Gate support in beta | Paid. Uses the same undocumented approach as BetterTouchTool; expect a feature or two missing from the first builds. |
| Thaw 2.0 | Works, pre-release builds | Free, open source. The community fork of Ice; this is where Ice’s development went. |
| Brow | Works | Free. Also bundles screenshots, a timer and a launcher you may not want. |
| BetterTouchTool | Partial | “Load Menu Bar Layout” action from version 6.569; known problems around Notification Center. |
| Ice | Broken | GitHub issue #954 open since 8 June 2026 with no maintainer response; last release September 2025. Use Thaw. |
| Hidden Bar | Mixed reports | The App Store build broke on beta 1; a 1.11.1 build from GitHub is reported to work. Rarely updated even before Golden Gate. |
| Barbee, Sane Bar | Broken | No fix announced. |
| Glow | Broken | No fix announced. See the section on Glow below. |
| TopNotch | Broken, update promised | Free. Not a manager: it paints the top of your wallpaper black to hide the notch, which on Golden Gate runs into the removed screenshot call rather than the menu bar change. Users report it no longer works; on 29 September 2026 its developer, MTW, replied that they are aware of the issue and hope to release an update within a couple of weeks. |
| Boring Old Menu Bar | Works, version 1.29 and later | Paid. Same wallpaper approach as TopNotch, rewritten for macOS 27, any color, separate light and dark settings. Version 1.28 for macOS 26 and earlier. |
If all you want is fewer icons
Before installing anything, see whether macOS 27 already does enough:
- Let the overflow arrow do it. If your complaint was icons disappearing behind the notch, the arrow is the fix and it needs no setup.
- Turn off Apple’s own icons. System Settings › Control Center has a switch for each of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Battery, Sound, Focus and the rest.
- Command-drag an icon off the bar to remove it, or along the bar to reorder.
- Look in each app’s settings for “Show icon in menu bar”. Most third-party apps have one.
What Apple’s version cannot do is let you decide which icons hide, keep a hidden set you can reveal with a click, or show different sets on different displays. If you need that, Thaw is the free answer and Bartender the paid one.
The other problem: a menu bar you can’t read
This is the one I get mail about, and it has nothing to do with icon hiding. Since Tahoe removed the bar’s background, a light wallpaper gives you black titles and a dark one white titles, and a busy or mid-tone picture gives you titles you squint at. Golden Gate did not fix this. Reports from the macOS 27 bug threads are the same as Tahoe’s: with Reduce transparency on, the tint behind the bar changes but the icons and titles still sit on the picture with little contrast.
Apple gives you three switches, none of them a color:
- System Settings › Menu Bar › Show menu bar background. Puts a translucent, Sequoia-style backdrop behind the titles. Try this first; for most wallpapers it is enough.
- System Settings › Appearance › Liquid Glass slider. Pulls the slider toward opaque and the glass effect becomes frosted everywhere, menu bar included when its background is shown. This is a whole-system setting, not a menu bar one.
- System Settings › Accessibility › Display › Reduce transparency. Replaces the blur with a flat fill across the entire interface: light grey in light mode, near-black in dark mode. Sidebars, Control Center, menus and widgets go flat with it.
If you want the bar a specific color, black, white, the old Catalina grey or anything else, the only route is the one that has existed since Big Sur: put something opaque behind the bar. Either paint a strip across the top of your wallpaper by hand, or use an app that does it for you. The menu bar color guide walks through the by-hand version and where it stops; the short version is that it falls apart the moment you have two displays, several Spaces, a dynamic wallpaper or both appearance modes.
If you used Glow
Glow’s pitch was a quieter menu bar on macOS 26, and it is one of the apps the single-window change took out. If what you miss is the tidier icon strip, Thaw or Bartender are the replacements above. If what you miss is the calmer bar, start with Show menu bar background; if that is not calm enough, a solid color is the next step.
A solid-color menu bar on macOS 27
Boring Old Menu Bar does not touch the menu bar and did not break when the menu bar changed. It renders a copy of your current wallpaper with a solid bar painted across the top, exactly where the menu bar sits, and sets that copy as the wallpaper on every display and in every Space. You pick one color for light mode and another for dark mode and the app follows the system.
macOS 27 as shipped: white titles over a light wallpaper.
The same Mac, wallpaper and menu bar with a black bar behind the titles. Nothing else changed.
What did change for macOS 27 is how the app does its painting. Through Tahoe it screenshotted the desktop and painted the bar onto that. Golden Gate removed the screenshot call, and removed it quietly: it fails without an error, so version 1.28 on macOS 27 runs, shows its icon and does nothing at all. Version 1.29 renders the copy from the wallpaper file itself instead. That works on Golden Gate, removes the Screen Recording permission, cannot produce a grey placeholder background, and keeps the scaling and fill color you set in System Settings. Version 1.29 and later need macOS 27 and an Apple silicon Mac; version 1.28 stays available for macOS 13 Ventura through 26 Tahoe and for Intel, and one unlock code covers both. There is a 14-day trial.
Two macOS 27 facts worth knowing whichever route you take:
- Apple’s wallpaper collections. Since macOS 26, Apple stores a whole collection such as Landscape or Cityscape in one file and tells apps only which file is in use, not which picture. Switching any wallpaper-based tool off can therefore bring back a different picture from the same collection. Setting a static image, or a solid color inside the app, avoids it.
- The wallpaper cache that never empties. Since Tahoe, macOS keeps a rendered copy of every picture ever set as a wallpaper, around 60 MB each for a 5K display, and never clears it (Apple bug FB20636593). It shows up as System Data in Storage. If you change wallpapers a few times a year it is harmless; with dynamic wallpapers, slide shows or a wallpaper-painting app it can grow by gigabytes. Boring Old Menu Bar 1.30 re-sets the same file when nothing has changed and deletes the cache entries it created itself, once you have granted it access to the folder. The troubleshooting page has the details and the folder path if you want to clean it by hand.
The notch on macOS 27
Unchanged. The overflow arrow stops icons vanishing behind the notch, but the notch itself is still there, and the only way to make it disappear is a black bar around it. You have four options, none of them new:
- Dark mode plus Reduce transparency gets you near-black, with the whole-interface side effects described above.
- A scaled resolution that doesn’t use the notch rows (System Settings › Displays) blacks out the strip at the cost of those rows of screen. This has existed since the first notched MacBooks.
- TopNotch, free, from the makers of CleanShot, paints the top of your wallpaper black. On macOS 27 it currently does nothing: users report it stopped working with Golden Gate, and the developer’s reply of 29 September 2026 says an update is planned “within the next couple of weeks”. On macOS 26 and earlier it works, with a long-standing caveat: it is meant to notice wallpaper changes by itself, but users on every version since Monterey report that it often needs a nudge after a wallpaper, Space or display change, re-selecting the wallpaper in System Settings, clicking its icon, or quitting and relaunching it. It also needs Reduce transparency off, because it relies on the bar being transparent so the painted strip shows through. Black only, with a handful of colors added in recent versions, and no separate light-mode setting.
- Boring Old Menu Bar’s black style does the same thing by the same means and additionally gives you white, the Catalina greys or any custom color, one for light mode and one for dark, on every display and in every Space. It absorbed our earlier De-Notch-ifier, so if you own one you have the other.
If all you want is the notch gone, you never use light mode and you are still on macOS 26, TopNotch is the answer and it is free. On macOS 27, until its update ships, the choice is between the resolution trick, Reduce transparency and the paid app. The paid app earns its price when you want a color other than black, a different bar in light and dark mode, or a bar that follows wallpaper changes without being nudged.
Before you upgrade: a checklist
| You rely on | Do this first |
|---|---|
| Bartender | Install the Bartender 7 Golden Gate beta from Bartender’s site before upgrading, and expect a feature or two to be missing. |
| Ice | Switch to Thaw. Ice has not been updated and its author has not responded. |
| Hidden Bar, Barbee, Sane Bar, Glow | Assume they will not work. Decide between Apple’s overflow arrow, Thaw and Bartender. |
| BetterTouchTool menu bar features | Update to 6.569 or later and set up a “Load Menu Bar Layout” trigger. |
| Reduce transparency for a readable bar | Still works. Try Show menu bar background and the Liquid Glass slider first; they affect less. |
| TopNotch | Does not work on macOS 27 as of early October 2026. The developer has promised an update; check topnotch.app before upgrading, or plan on one of the alternatives above. |
| A hand-painted wallpaper strip | Still works on a single static wallpaper. The text color follows the strip less reliably than on Sequoia. |
| Boring Old Menu Bar | Install 1.30 after upgrading; 1.28 is for macOS 26 and earlier. Grant the cache-folder access when asked. |
| An Intel Mac | You can’t upgrade. Stay on Tahoe and keep the Tahoe versions of everything. |
FAQ
Does Bartender work on macOS 27? Yes, Bartender 7 has Golden Gate support in beta, through an undocumented workaround. Bartender’s own site says which features are still missing. Check it before upgrading.
Does TopNotch work on macOS 27? Not at the moment. It paints the wallpaper rather than touching the menu bar, so the single-window change is not what broke it; the likely cause is the removed desktop screenshot call that also broke Boring Old Menu Bar 1.28, which fails silently. Users report it stopped working with Golden Gate and its developer confirmed on 29 September 2026 that an update is in the works. Until then, Reduce transparency in dark mode or Boring Old Menu Bar’s black style will hide the notch.
Does Ice work on macOS 27? No. The bug report has been open since the first beta with no response from the maintainer. Thaw, the community fork, works and is free.
Is there a built-in Bartender in macOS 27 now? Partly. macOS collapses surplus icons behind an arrow automatically, and you can remove Apple’s own icons in Control Center settings. You cannot choose which third-party icons hide or keep a hidden set to reveal on demand.
Why did an arrow appear at the right of my menu bar? That is the new overflow button. Your bar ran out of room, or icons would have ended up under the notch. Click it to see what is hidden.
Why are my menu bar titles white, or hard to read, after upgrading? The bar has had no background since Tahoe, so macOS picks the text color from the wallpaper’s brightness. Turn on System Settings › Menu Bar › Show menu bar background, or give the bar a solid color.
Can I make the macOS 27 menu bar opaque? Reduce transparency makes it, and everything else, flat grey or near-black. For an opaque bar in a color of your choosing without changing the rest of the interface, the wallpaper strip or Boring Old Menu Bar.
Will Apple break the new workarounds too? Possibly. Every developer shipping one says so. The wallpaper-based approach to color is the exception, since it uses nothing undocumented: it just sets a wallpaper.
I’m on an Intel Mac. macOS 27 doesn’t run on Intel. Everything on this page about Tahoe still applies to you, and the Tahoe versions of Bartender, Ice and Boring Old Menu Bar 1.28 keep working.
Frank Reiff is the developer of Boring Old Menu Bar, A Better Finder Rename and A Better Finder Attributes, Mac utilities in continuous development since 1996. Get in touch with a menu bar problem this guide doesn’t cover.