Good point, but I just went through all my open apps and the only app that had empty toolbar chrome (the top part of a window that has the Close/Minimize/Zoom without anything else on that row) was Telegram and VSCode.

The rest of the apps have app UI on the same row as the Close/Minimize/Zoom buttons which would be hidden by the notch.

But empty toolbars is a good usecase for rendering an app window on the notch. I'm actually surprised how many apps utilize that space!

I'm not concerned with whether what's covered by the notch is empty or not. Chrome has tabs that would be covered by the notch, but its largely irrelevant, I can still click it or swap to that tab easily enough.

Similar to how the notch doesn't materially degrade video content, despite covering some aspects of the video. We've seen iPhone make the choice to intentionally obscure a portion of app content for years without any major concerns.

Fair enough. But it's why the notch space doesn't feel like pure waste.

If you right-click -> "Get info" on most applications, there's a checkbox for "Scale to fit below built-in camera (notch)".

I've only had to use that for one game and iirc Parallels.app that were rendering on top of the notch. It would be nice if you could force the behavior per app with that, but it's only to fix apps that, I suppose, use some drawing API that lets them render on top of the notch.

That's a fair point -- for whatever reason, I could never get into auto-hide for the menu bar (tho I do use it for the dock). I think maybe because I tend to trigger showing it accidentally too much (vs the dock on bottom where it's not an issue because usually there isn't other actionable stuff down there)?

But definitely, if you like menu-bar autohide where you're coming from makes sense.