Can you get a Dynamic Island on a MacBook?

Why the notch is empty by default

Apple introduced the notch on the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro in October 2021, then brought it to the redesigned MacBook Air with the M2 in 2022. It houses the 1080p camera, and macOS simply paints the menu bar around it.

So every 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro since 2021 has a notch, along with the 13.6 inch MacBook Air (M2 and later) and the 15 inch MacBook Air. The old-design 13 inch MacBook Pro, the M1 Air, and anything earlier do not.

There is no system feature that uses this space the way iOS uses the Dynamic Island. Apple ships nothing for it, so third-party apps fill the gap.

The trick is simple. A notch app draws an always-on-top borderless black window over the camera housing. Collapsed, it blends into the cutout; on hover or on an event, it animates open and renders real UI.

General-purpose notch apps

The general category is mature. Three names come up in every roundup, and they differ mainly in price and focus.

NotchNook (paid)

NotchNook from lo.cafe costs 25 dollars one time for up to 5 devices, or 3 dollars per month for 2, with a 15 day refund window. It requires macOS 14.6 or later.

Now playing from Apple Music or Spotify shows in the notch much like it does on an iPhone. It adds a file shelf you can drag downloads into, widgets for calendar, shortcuts, and a camera mirror, and it supports multiple monitors. On a Mac without a notch it turns into a small handler with the same functions.

boring.notch (open source)

boring.notch is free and GPL-3.0 licensed, developed in the open on GitHub. The notch becomes a music control center with a visualizer, plus calendar integration, a file shelf with AirDrop support, and a replacement for the system volume and brightness HUDs.

Install it with brew install --cask TheBoredTeam/boring-notch/boring-notch. If you want to understand how a notch window actually works, this is the codebase to read; plenty of other notch apps started as forks of it.

Notchy (free)

Notchy is free with no trial, license, or subscription, funded by donations. It is native SwiftUI on Apple Silicon and runs on macOS 13 or later.

Feature count is its pitch: music controls, clipboard history, a Pomodoro timer, a drag and drop file shelf, window snapping, a scratchpad, and HUD replacements in one download. It lands between the other two, with more bundled than boring.notch and no price tag like NotchNook.

The developer niche: Claude Code islands

A newer category targets one audience: people running AI coding agents. A Claude Code session works for minutes at a time, then blocks on a permission prompt or a question while you read something in another window.

The notch is the one screen region visible over every app, so a wave of islands now puts agent state there. We keep a full comparison at Claude Code notch apps; the short version follows.

Vibe Island covers the widest set of agents: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, OpenCode, Droid, and Kiro. MioIsland monitors, approves, and jumps to Claude Code sessions from the notch. CodeIsland is open source, tracks a long list of agent CLIs, and adds iPhone and Apple Watch companions.

NotchViber for Claude Code is our app, so weigh this section accordingly. It is free, Claude Code only, under 1 MB as a dmg, built by one developer for macOS 14 and later on Apple Silicon, and not affiliated with Anthropic.

Collapsed, the wings beside the notch show your 5-hour block percentage and time to reset on the left, with 7-day and per-model usage on the right. The numbers are estimated locally the way ccusage does it: weighted tokens, 5-hour blocks, a 7-day window, de-duplicated message IDs.

Hover expands a session list with live activity and todo progress. Blocked questions, permission prompts, and plan reviews render as cards you can answer with one click, and the answer is typed into your terminal through macOS Accessibility.

Clicking a session jumps to the exact terminal window in Ghostty, iTerm2, Terminal, WezTerm, kitty, Alacritty, Warp, Zed, Cursor, or VS Code. Everything is computed from the JSONL transcripts in ~/.claude/projects, with no network calls and no telemetry.

Because the numbers are an estimate rather than Anthropic's ledger, calibrate once against /usage. Our Claude Code usage limits guide explains how the weighting works.

If you only want the numbers, a terminal tool like ccusage or a menu bar percentage tracker does the job without touching the notch. The islands earn their place when you also want to answer prompts and jump between sessions.

What to check before installing one

A notch app runs all day next to your camera. Four things separate a good one from an annoyance.

• Idle CPU. Open Activity Monitor and watch the process while the island is collapsed. It should sit near zero; constant redraws and polling timers are the usual offenders.
• Battery. Anything animating continuously in the notch, such as an audio visualizer, shows up in battery life on a laptop. Event-driven updates cost almost nothing.
• Non-notch displays. In clamshell mode or on an external monitor there is no notch. Check the fallback: NotchNook shows a small handler, NotchViber shows a floating pill, and most others do something similar.
• Data access. Agent monitors read your session transcripts by definition. Prefer tools that state exactly which files they read and that work without a network connection.

The bottom line

Any MacBook with a notch can have a Dynamic Island today, and Macs without one can run the same UI as a floating panel. For music and files, start free with Notchy or boring.notch, and pay for NotchNook if you want the extra polish.

If your notch time would mostly be spent watching Claude Code, skip the general apps and pick one of the agent islands instead. That is the niche NotchViber was built for.