What Those Black Dots Under Your MacBook's Apps Mean

You may have recently purchased your first macOS computer, perhaps the new MacBook Neo that's been turning heads after Apple's release, and you're still learning the ropes of the new operating system. You may be wondering what the black dots that appear only under certain apps in the dock are. Or you may be a more experienced macOS user who hasn't even given the black dots any thought while you've been using a Mac, and you've only recently started to question them. 

The explanation is very simple: the black dot is a visual indicator showing that an app is open. The black dot appears when you open the app and disappears when you close it. Apple explains in a support document that simply clicking the red dot in the top left corner of the app, which will show an "X" when you hover over it, will close the app window, but the app itself stays open. Therefore, the black dot that appears under the app serves as a visual reminder that the app is open. 

The black dot appears under all the apps you have in your dock that are open, including apps not normally kept in the Dock. The dot will appear on any Mac, including MacBooks and Mac Minis because they run macOS. Importantly, the dots turn white when Dark mode is enabled. While the iPad has a dock that looks like the one you see on Macs, iPadOS will not show black dots under the apps that are open on the tablet.

You may have bought your first MacBook in 2026, but Apple has been using a version of the black dot for several decades. The Mac OS X release from 2000 had a triangle instead of a black dot, inherited from the NeXT era of the operating system, when three dots were used. The purpose was identical: to mark open applications. By Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (2007), the indicator became a white dot, but that was only a design change, as the dot still worked as before.

In 2011, Apple released Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, and the dock came with the same white visual indicator for open apps. However, Apple made a big change that year, turning the white dot into an optional indicator. Users could remove the visual indicator if they chose to (more on that later). In 2014, Apple made another big visual change for macOS when Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite replaced the white dot with the current black dot. The change was significant, as Apple replaced an obvious indicator with a more muted design. The black dots were almost imperceptible by comparison. The same design is available in macOS Tahoe, as of this writing.

If, for some reason, you don't appreciate the appearance of apps with black dots under them, you can remove the indicator with ease. Click the Apple menu at the top left corner of your Mac, go to Settings, and look for the Desktop & Dock menu. There, you'll have a toggle for "Show indicators for open applications," which you'll have to switch off. Apple doesn't call the indicator "black dot" in the Settings app, so searching for "black dot" in the Settings app will not reveal the toggle you need.

Keeping the indicator in place may be a better idea, as it helps you see which apps are open on your MacBook or Mac desktop at any given time. If you're running too many apps on an older Mac model, your device may feel more sluggish. You'll want to close some of the more resource-intensive apps that you might be using to free up RAM and speed up your Mac. The black dot will help you identify which apps are open.

To close an app that's marked as open, right-click on it and click the Quit option. You can also hold the Control key and click the app icon to find the same Quit menu. Sometimes, the app may not quit. In that scenario, you'll want to open the Activity Monitor app, which also shows you all the apps and processes open on your Mac, identify the app that's failing to quit, select it, and click the "Stop" or "Force Quit" menu item to force-close it. The black dot will disappear from underneath that app, serving as a confirmation that you've closed it successfully.