The Mac notch and the iPhone's Dynamic Island: what each one does

The Mac does not have a Dynamic Island. On iPhone, Apple turned the cutout for the front camera and Face ID sensors into a black pill that grows, shrinks and changes shape to show what is going on: a timer counting down, a song playing, a call in progress, the next turn in Maps. On a MacBook, the notch holds the camera and the menu bar flows around it, but at the time of writing macOS does not draw anything inside it or animate it.

Both start from the same problem: a piece of hardware at the top of the screen that the software has to live with. This post looks at how each platform handles it, what Apple has brought across to the Mac so far, and why the top middle of the screen is such a good place for small, glanceable things.

What the Dynamic Island is

Apple introduced the Dynamic Island with the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max in 2022, then brought it to every model in the iPhone 15 line the year after. Most iPhones since have it.

Physically, it is a cutout in the display for the front camera and the Face ID sensors. The clever part is software. iOS draws black around the cutout so that it looks like one solid pill, then grows that shape when something is happening. It has three main sizes:

• Compact. A slim pill with a little information on each side, such as a timer icon on the left and the time left on the right.
• Minimal. When two things are going on at once, one takes the pill and the other shows as a small separate circle beside it.
• Expanded. Touch and hold the island and it opens into a bigger panel with controls, such as play and pause for music.

Tap it and the app behind it opens. The system uses it too: the Face ID check when you unlock, AirDrop progress, the charge level when you plug in, a bell when you switch to silent. The camera never moves. The shape around it does all the talking.

Live Activities: what fills the island

Most of what appears in the Dynamic Island comes from Live Activities, which arrived in an iPhone update later in 2022. A Live Activity is a live view of something that is happening now and will end soon: a sports score, a ride on its way, a delivery, a flight, a running timer. It shows on the Lock Screen, and on iPhones that have one, in the Dynamic Island. Apps add them, keep them up to date, and remove them when the thing is over.

That last part is the important bit. A Live Activity is not a notification asking you to do something. It is status, updated in place, at the edge of where you are looking, for as long as it matters. You read it when you want to, the way you glance at a watch, and then it is gone. Nothing piles up for later.

What the Mac notch does today

The notch arrived on the Mac with the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro in late 2021, and the MacBook Air followed from the M2 model in 2022. It holds the FaceTime camera and, next to it, the small green light that comes on whenever the camera is in use. No Mac has Face ID. Touch ID lives on the keyboard instead, so the notch has less going on behind it than the iPhone's cutout does.

macOS treats the notch as a gap in the menu bar. App menus run along the left of it, status icons along the right, and nothing is drawn inside it. When there are more status icons than fit, macOS hides the ones that would run into the notch, which surprises a lot of people the first time (there is a fix in menu bar icons hidden behind the notch). In full screen, the strip beside the notch turns black and the notch disappears into it, which is covered in full screen apps and the notch.

The closest Apple has come to a Mac Dynamic Island so far arrived with macOS Tahoe, which can show Live Activities from your iPhone in the Mac's menu bar if the two are set up for iPhone Mirroring. Click one and the app opens in the iPhone Mirroring window. It is a useful bridge, but it sits in the menu bar beside the other icons. The notch itself still does not change shape.

Why the two are so different

Apple has not explained the difference, but a few things set the Mac apart:

• The Mac already has a status strip. The menu bar has shown the time, the battery, Wi-Fi and app status for decades, and the notch sits right in the middle of it. On iPhone, the status bar around the cutout was cramped, and the island gave live status a home.
• The notch is not always there. Many people use a MacBook with an external display or with the lid closed, and desktop Macs have no notch at all. A feature tied to one built-in screen would be missing for a lot of Mac users, a lot of the time.
• Pointers, not thumbs. On iPhone you touch the island. On a Mac you would have to move the pointer to the very top of the screen, which is also where the menu bar reappears in full screen.
• Mac screens are busy. An iPhone shows one app at a time. A Mac shows many windows, and the menu bar already changes with whichever app is in front.

None of this means the notch has to stay a dead spot. It means anything that lives there has to cope with the notch sometimes not being on the screen you are looking at.

The case for a friendly notch

The ideas behind the Dynamic Island suit the Mac well, even if Apple has not used them there.

• It is near where you already look. The top middle of the screen is close to where you read all day, so a change there is easy to notice without sitting on top of your work.
• It shows up, then gets out of the way. Something appears while it matters and is gone after. There is nothing to clear later.
• It says little. A few words and a face or an icon. If it needs more, it is the wrong place.
• It is calm. It changes in place instead of sliding a new card across your work.

Compare that with a notification banner. It slides in from the corner, looks like every other banner from every other app, and either disappears before you have read it or waits in Notification Center with dozens of others. That is a big part of why reminders in banners are so easy to ignore, which is the subject of why a character beats another notification.

Characters in the notch

This is the idea behind Notchpals: a crew of characters who live in the Mac's notch and come out to remind you to drink water, eat, sit up, move, rest your eyes, get to bed, focus, and look after yourself and your Mac. A visit works a lot like an island opening: the black shape at the top of the screen opens, a character slides down, and a speech bubble shows its name and its line, with two buttons, Later and Done. It stays up for about 9 seconds, longer if you hover over it, then tucks itself back in.

It borrows the island's manners as well. A Live Activity shows up only while there is something live to show, and the characters likewise only say what fits the moment, so you won't hear about lunch at ten in the morning or about the battery while the Mac is on its charger. Nobody comes out while an app has the mic or camera on, or while a full screen app fills the notch's screen, and nothing appears while you are away from the keyboard. Repeating nudges such as water and eye breaks come from one daily allowance shared by the whole crew, between four and twelve a day depending on the level you pick, so the notch never turns into a stream of alerts.

And like the island, it answers a touch. Click a character while it is out and you get a reply. Blip, the wide-eyed alien who looks after your eyes, takes being clicked well:

BlipBoop! You touched an alien! I'm telling everyone back home!

Macs without a notch get a drawn one. On those, or with the built-in screen closed, Notchpals puts a small black island in the middle of the main display's top edge, and the characters peek out of that. When a MacBook's own notched screen is open, the characters use it, even if another display is the main one.