Live Activities arrived with iOS 16.1 in October 2022, and the pitch was simple: some things are not messages, they are ongoing. A timer. A food delivery. A ride on its way. The score of a game you actually care about. Instead of pinging you about these things, the phone pins them to a fixed spot, first on the Lock Screen, and then inside the Dynamic Island that the iPhone 14 Pro had introduced a month earlier.
Three and a half years on, this is one of my favorite things about iOS, and I say that as someone who builds Mac software for a living. Glance at the top of the phone and you know the pasta timer has three minutes left. You never asked. Nothing interrupted you. The information was just there.
Now look at the Mac. My MacBook Pro has more than five times the screen area of my iPhone and runs far more simultaneous work: builds, uploads, recordings, calls, downloads, timers. And in 2026 it has less glanceable ongoing state than the phone in my pocket. That inversion is what this essay is about.
State is not an event
A notification models an event. Something happened, here is a banner, dismiss it, done. That shape is right for "you got a message" and wrong for "your meeting starts in nine minutes," because the second fact stays true, and keeps changing, for nine more minutes.
Treat ongoing state as a series of events and you get to pick between two failure modes. Either the app pings you repeatedly on the way to the deadline, which is spam, or it pings you once at whatever offset you configured and then goes silent, which is an ambush. Calendar on the Mac picks the second: one alert, then nothing until the meeting has quietly started without you. Every calendar tool I have used sits somewhere on this spectrum, and none of the positions are good.
The iPhone's actual insight was that ongoing things should not notify at all.
They should be visible. A live activity has a fixed address on the screen, costs nothing while you ignore it, and answers in a single glance when you need it. No click, no ⌘Tab, no hunting through a pile of windows for the one with the progress bar. Interruption is the most expensive thing software can do to a person who is concentrating; a glance at a known location is close to free. For anything that has a duration, glanceability beats notification every single time.
What the Mac gives you in 2026
So what does macOS actually offer for "something is in progress right now"? Three things, all of them older than the problem.
Menu bar icons. The default answer. Start a timer in the Clock app (which only reached the Mac with Ventura in 2022) and you get a countdown squeezed in next to the clock. Start a screen recording with ⇧⌘5 and the only evidence is a stop glyph a few pixels wide. The microphone-in-use indicator is an orange dot tucked inside Control Center, where you will see it only if you go looking. These are all statuses crammed into a format sized for 1998, when the most exciting ongoing state a computer had was whether the modem was still connected. And on notched MacBooks it gets worse: icons that do not fit beside the notch are hidden entirely, with no indication they exist. I wrote about that particular fight separately.
Widgets. macOS Sonoma put widgets on the desktop in 2023, and they are genuinely pleasant for ambient information like weather. But the desktop is the one surface guaranteed to be buried while you work, and Sonoma even fades widgets toward the wallpaper tint the moment an app is frontmost. A desktop widget answers "what is the state of this thing" only after you shove every window aside to look at it. Right idea, wrong layer.
Notifications. The fallback for everything else, with the failure modes covered above. macOS will happily tell you a download finished. It has no vocabulary for a download that is 60 percent done.
None of these gives the Mac what the island gives the iPhone: one fixed, always-visible slot where in-progress things live.
A running timer keeps ticking in one fixed spot instead of pinging you once at a preset offset.
A download or copy shows how far along it is, not just a banner once it finishes.
Album art sits on one side of the cutout, the playing track a glance away on the other.
Each one lives at the notch and answers in a glance, no notification required.
Borrowing the island back
Third-party developers noticed the obvious thing. Since 2021, every MacBook has shipped with a black landmark at the top center of the screen, surrounded by space no app is allowed to draw in, in the one region your eyes already visit to read the clock. I covered how the notch got there in an earlier post; the short version is that Apple grew the display around the camera and then did nothing with the neighborhood.
Notch apps treat that neighborhood as the Mac's Dynamic Island. Now playing with album art on one side, the live number on the other. A running timer that keeps ticking where you can see it. A calendar countdown that shrinks toward zero instead of shouting once. AirPods battery when they connect, recording status while the camera is actually recording. Compact glance at the landmark, expanded card on hover. The pattern is a direct port of the iPhone anatomy, and it ports cleanly because the anatomy was never phone-specific.
Droppy, the app I make, is my bet on this pattern. It turns the notch into a file tray, clipboard manager, media hub and live activities: timers that stay in sync with the Apple Clock app, a calendar and agenda at the notch, AirPods connect animations, live VPN status with a session timer, recording status sitting next to the camera doing the recording. On displays without a notch, the same thing floats in a Dynamic Island style pill. It is a one-time $6.99 purchase for macOS 14 or later, and I am not the only one circling this idea; the comparison page covers the other notch apps honestly, including where they beat mine.
Apple is halfway there
Apple clearly knows the gap exists, because it recently shipped half a fix. macOS Tahoe can mirror the Live Activities from your iPhone into the Mac's menu bar: your food delivery shows up as a small pill next to the clock, and clicking it opens the app through iPhone Mirroring.
Read that again. Your Mac can display a live activity generated by the phone in your pocket, but a Mac app still has no way to create one of its own. There is no ActivityKit for macOS. A screen recording happening on this machine, three feet from your eyes, gets a smaller and dumber indicator than a burrito that is four blocks away. The mirroring feature is simultaneously an admission that the Mac needs glanceable ongoing state and a demonstration that Apple has not built the native version. The plumbing exists. The API does not.
What native live activities would change
Imagine Apple shipping the real thing: a system slot at the top of the screen, a public API, third-party apps pinning state the way they already do on iOS. Xcode could pin a build. Finder could pin a long copy instead of orphaning a progress window behind six others. Safari could pin your flight. Zoom could pin the fact that you are still, somehow, on mute. Every app that owns a duration would get a home for it, and the Mac's biggest advantage, screen space, would finally serve the pattern phones proved people want.
I genuinely hope Apple does this, even though it would absorb part of what my own app does. A native API reaches places no third party can: sandboxed system processes, other people's apps, the login window.
But I would not hold my breath, and the volume HUD is my evidence. Apple's system-level Mac interface moves on a decade cadence; the translucent overlay that appears when you tap a volume key predates the iPhone and has survived essentially unchanged. Live Activities shipped on iOS as a full framework with Lock Screen and island presentations in its first year, because the iPhone is where Apple spends its interface ambition. The Mac gets the mirrored leftovers.
So third parties will keep leading, the way they usually do here. Clipboard history is still third-party territory on the Mac after four decades. Window snapping was a cottage industry until Sequoia shipped native tiling in 2024. The cycle is stable: the community builds the feature, proves the demand, and Apple eventually ships the system version while everyone moves on to the next gap. Until that day comes for live activities, the most iPhone-like part of the Mac will remain a strip of pixels around a camera, built by Apple, ignored by Apple, and kept alive by developers who could not stop staring at it.