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I never had this problem on macOS 13 Ventura and older versions and now this seems very annoying when using macOS 14 Sonoma.

When there are too many icons in the Menu bar, at some point they are just hidden (even though there is available space).

I noticed this issue when using MenuMeters and setting the "Vertical Bar" option in the CPU preferences (because it takes a lot of space). Initially I thought it was a bug of this application but then figured out that any new icon will not be displayed in the menu bar after a certain amount of space is already taken.

MenuMeters CPU preference

This is how my menu bar looked like in Ventura:

MenuBars Ventura

And now in Sonoma any icon would become automatically hidden after a certain length (regardless if there is space afterwards or not).

Users on the web suggest Bartender to mitigate this issue, however it is yet not ideal (and also it is paid software).

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  • Either: Get your Menu Meters usage under control, or use Bartender. Just use Bartender. You have paid for your Mac, now pay for a bit of really useful software. Also iStat Menus is easier on the menubar space.
    – Gilby
    Commented May 16 at 10:30
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    Do you really need to monitor all 16 cores of your CPU separately all the time? I have Activity Monitor running in the background, and if there's a problem, I'll have a look. By and large, the Mac can look after itself.
    – benwiggy
    Commented May 16 at 10:58
  • @benwiggy not necessarily all 16 but this has been very useful to me for years to monitor how the CPU is loaded (are tasks parallelised or only one or two cores are loaded?)
    – Francesco Borzi
    Commented May 16 at 12:21
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    If you don't want to use Bartender, the alternative free option is Hidden Bar.
    – agarza
    Commented May 16 at 14:39
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    “… but I would like to have a proper solution for this bug.” Then you’ll need to file a bug report with Apple.
    – SteveM
    Commented May 16 at 14:46

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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There is a plist key to change the size of the gap between menu items:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int #
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An alternative strategy to see loading on each core (or thread) is to use Activity Monitor:

CPU Usage

To display this:

Control-Click (or right click) on the Activity Monitor's Dock icon, select Monitor > Show CPU Usage.

You might also like > Show CPU History. That is more informative.

CPU History

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