Comment by pndy

Whenever I look at my partner's Macbook I'm having a flashbacks from Win9x/2000 times when tray area was filled up.

But Microsoft managed to deal with that issue - years ago. With XP they introduced collapsible tray area and later, it also become possible to rearrange icons.

Somehow for Apple the problem doesn't exist or they assume that their users will choose a 3rd party solution. Frankly, it's them who should provide the solution straight within the operating system. Especially when Apple computers revolve nowadays more around laptops which by definition have smaller display area.