Make macbook pro as if there is no notch

Solution 1:

Two hours after your question, Apple released macOS Monterey 12.1 which has a fix for some notch display issues.

After upgrading to Monterey 12.1, you'll find that the menu bar items (on the right hand side) won't get obscured by the notch.

You might want to reconsider loosing the extra screen real estate now that at least some of these issues have been fixed.

If you still want to do as per your question, you can actually do that using this work around:

For the few programs that do not yet properly support the notch and have issues with too many menu items - Apple created a "work around feature": Open Finder, find the app, right-click and select Get Info. In the small window that opens, enable Scale to fit below built-in camera.

Now when you open that app, the menu bar will appear below the notch. This goes not only for that particular app, but for all the apps in the same Space (if you're not using Spaces, then it is simply for all your apps).

So you could simply consider enabling that work-around for a program you always have open (for example a browser) - and your menubar will be located as you requested.

Solution 2:

SwitchResX. Just change 1512x982 HiDPI 3:2 to 1512x945 HiDPI 16:10 (or any other resolution with 16:10 aspect ratio) and system will ignore top 74 pixels. I'm using this for some time and it works perfectly. It is strange that macrumors post where I found this solution seems to be deleted.