Glossary/Figures Activity Monitor leaves out

Menu bar item

Also: menu bar extra, status item

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Quick answer

A menu bar item is an icon or figure at the right end of the Mac's menu bar, put there by an app or by macOS, with a menu or a panel behind it. Wi-Fi, the battery and the clock are Apple's; a system monitor's readouts are the most common third-party ones.

Menu bar items are how a monitor stays visible without a window: a CPU figure, a memory graph or a temperature sits in the bar all day and a click opens the detail. Apple calls them menu bar extras, developers call them status items, and most people call them the icons in the top right.

They come with two habits worth knowing. Hold ⌘ and drag an item to move it, or drag it off the bar to remove it, which works for Apple's items and most apps' alike. And the bar has finite room: on a MacBook with a notch, items that do not fit are simply not shown, with no sign that they exist, so a monitor that adds several items may push another app's out of sight.

Arranging and removing menu bar items

Hold ⌘, then drag. Items slide past each other, and the order is remembered across restarts. To remove one of Apple's, ⌘-drag it out of the bar until an × appears and let go; it comes back from System Settings → Control Center. A third-party item is removed in the app's own settings or by quitting the app.

Some items cannot be moved past the ones to their right: the clock and Control Center stay at the end.

Hold the ⌘ key.
Drag the item left or right along the menu bar.
Let go where you want it. To remove an Apple item, drag it downward off the bar instead.

When menu bar items disappear

On a Mac with a notch, the menu bar has room for only so many items to the left of the notch, fewer when the front app has long menus, and anything beyond that is hidden rather than squeezed. Apps like Bartender and Ice exist to fold the overflow into a second row or a menu. A monitor that puts each readout in its own item is the usual reason the bar fills, which is why a good one lets you choose how many items it adds and what each shows.

An external display without a notch shows more, and the same items appear there in the same order.

Questions people ask

How do I rearrange the icons in the Mac menu bar?

Hold ⌘ and drag an item to where you want it. This works for Apple's items and for most third-party ones, and macOS remembers the order.

Why is a menu bar item missing on my MacBook?

The bar is full. On a MacBook with a notch, items that do not fit to the left of the notch are hidden with no indication. Remove items you do not use, ⌘-drag the important ones to the right so they show first, or use a menu bar manager.

Does Activity Monitor have a menu bar item?

No. It can show a CPU graph in its Dock icon (View → Dock Icon), but it puts nothing in the menu bar. A third-party monitor does that.

Step by step: Volume mixer for Mac.

Want these figures in the menu bar? See the best menu bar monitors for Mac, or the best Activity Monitor alternatives. Or browse every term in the glossary.