Dock refuses to move to main display

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Dock refuses to move to main display

macOS is far superior to Windows in almost everything, but some things in macOS need a lot of work. Case in point: I have three monitors, two of them side by side, and one on top of the main one. That is reflected in the display layout in the display arrange settings.

But right now I need to have macOS with one monitor, the one that is on top of the main one, and Windows on the two main monitors. So I went into the display settings, and then Arrange, and set the top monitor to be the main display. That caused the desktop icons to switch to the top monitor, but the dock stayed in the current monitor, the one that is normally my main monitor, but that right now I need to switch the input to my PC.

Now, the usual process (which is very poorly designed and works after several tries), which is to move the pointer to the top of the display you want the dock on, then move the pointer to the bottom of that display, doesn't work at all in this case, probably because the main display is above the one that has the dock. Whatever the cause is, I can't get it to send the dock to the top display. I tried like 15 times already.

So what's my only choice? To disconnect the bottom two monitors from my Mac Studio to force the dock to appear only on the top monitor. This is beyond ridiculous. macOS has so many amazing features that put it like ten years ahead of Windows on so many levels, and every time I use Windows I'm reminded of them because I need to do something that would be super easy in macOS and takes several steps in Windows 11, like for example having OCR in any picture or video that I open in Preview or the QuickTime Player, or simply converting a PNG or TIFF to JPG with a right click and a couple of steps, something that in Windows forces me to open Affinity Photo.

But for all its flaws, what the people at Microsoft got right is that when several monitors are connected to a PC, all of them have the task bar available. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I searched all the settings for the Dock and there's no option to have it in all the monitors. Am I wrong?

Should I have to disconnect cables just to achieve such a simple thing as having macOS show in one display only?

Mac Studio, macOS 15.3

Posted on Mar 29, 2025 11:29 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 29, 2025 11:33 AM in response to RobFocus

Hi!

You’re right that macOS has some great features, but when it comes to managing multiple monitors, it’s not always perfect. In fact, macOS doesn’t offer a native option to display the Dock on all connected monitors as Windows does with the taskbar. In macOS, the Dock is designed to be visible only on the main display, which can be changed by moving the mouse pointer to the edge of the monitor up or down.

In your case, where you have multiple monitors and want the dock to appear on the top monitor, unfortunately there is no direct feature to make the dock appear on both monitors without disconnecting one of the lower screens.

However, there is a possible alternative solution:

1. Change display settings: You can go to System Preferences Monitors and move the menu bar (the top menu) to the upper monitor. This will make the Dock appear on that display, but it does not solve the problem of having the Dock on all monitors at once.

2. Third-party software: There are also some third-party apps, such as DisplayMenu or MultiMonitorTool, that might give you more options in managing your monitors, but support for the multi-monitor dock is limited anyway.

The choice to unplug the lower monitors to force the Dock on the upper monitor might seem a bit extreme, but unfortunately without a change in settings or a third-party app, it seems to be the only solution at the moment to get the behavior you want.

Unfortunately, Apple has not yet implemented a feature that allows you to have the Dock on multiple displays as it happens with the Windows taskbar.

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