Marcel Winatschek

Show Me Your Bar

My Mac menu bar is a personality test that fits in half an inch of screen space. Mine’s nearly empty—Bluetooth, volume, clock, Spotlight. Then I look at other people’s Macs and there’s this wall of icons, everything from abandoned utilities to backup software they installed years ago and forgot about.

You can tell who cleaned theirs out and who just let it accumulate. It shouldn’t matter, right? A few pixels at the top of your screen. But it does say something. It says whether you think about visual friction, whether you can tolerate clutter, whether you’re actually minimalist or just performing it.

My menu bar is a lie about who I am. I’m not minimalist about anything else—I just can’t stand looking at a clusterfuck every time I glance up from the keyboard.