Every few weeks someone asks me a version of the same question: you build a notch app, so what happens to you when Apple removes the notch? It used to be hypothetical. It isn't anymore. The rumor mill now points, with unusual consistency, at a redesigned high-end MacBook that drops the notch for a small hole-punch camera. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple may even ship it under a new name: MacBook Ultra.
So this post answers the question properly. What is actually rumored, how solid those rumors look, and what a notchless MacBook means for an app like Droppy. Spoiler for the nervous: the answer has been sitting in Droppy's settings for years.
What the rumors actually say
Stripped of headline glitter, the reporting from MacRumors, 9to5Mac and Bloomberg converges on a handful of claims about the next high-end MacBook:
- The notch goes away. In its place, a hole-punch cutout for the camera, with active display area around the sensor.
- A Dynamic Island comes to the Mac. Apple is reportedly considering iPhone-style software that treats the area around the cutout as a live surface.
- OLED replaces mini-LED. Deeper blacks, per-pixel brightness, faster response.
- A touchscreen. The first Mac you can poke on purpose.
- M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, after a reported revision of the chip roadmap, in a thinner chassis.
- Late 2026 to early 2027, with the later window looking more likely as the memory shortage squeezes schedules.
The usual caveats apply. Nothing here is announced, dates slip, and touchscreen Mac rumors specifically have died more deaths than any other Apple story. But the hole-punch claim has held steady across multiple reports for over a year, and it matches what Apple's display suppliers are tooling for. I'd treat the shape change as likely, and everything else as negotiable.
Rough illustration of the camera housing shrinking over time, not measured hardware. 2027 is a rumor, not a promise.
The quiet headline: Apple would be admitting the notch apps were right
Here's the part of the rumor I find genuinely funny. For five years the notch did nothing. The menu bar flowed around it, and that was the whole story. Third-party developers were the ones who decided the top-center of the screen was valuable: a fixed landmark your eyes already know, in space no app was using. That idea grew into a whole category, which I've compared at length.
A Mac Dynamic Island is Apple agreeing with that premise. It says the area around the camera should show live state: your music, your timers, your transfers. If it ships, the notch-app idea doesn't die. It gets sherlocked into the operating system, which in Apple land is the sincerest form of flattery.
On the iPhone, the Dynamic Island is deliberately conservative: system alerts and Live Activities, no files, no third-party surface to build on. If the Mac version follows that template, there will still be a wide gap between what Apple ships and what a dedicated tool does with the same pixels. That gap is where Droppy lives today, and where it keeps living.
Droppy was never really a notch app
The name of the category is misleading, and the MacBook Ultra is about to make that obvious. Droppy doesn't need the black rectangle. It needs the top edge of your screen. The notch is just one costume it wears there. It already runs three ways:
On today's MacBooks, Droppy hugs the notch and grows out of it: hover to open the shelf, and HUDs morph out of the housing itself.
On a hole-punch MacBook Ultra, Droppy's floating island pill sits around the camera, exactly like the Dynamic Island the rumors describe. That mode ships today.
On iMacs, external monitors and older MacBooks there is no cutout at all, so Droppy floats its surface at the top edge. You choose a notch shape or a pill per display.
The same features ride every shape. Only the silhouette changes.
This wasn't foresight about the MacBook Ultra, to be honest. It came from a boring, practical place: people run Droppy on iMacs, Mac minis, and external monitors, none of which have a notch. Supporting a floating Dynamic Island pill was the only way to serve those Macs, and choosing between a drawn notch or a pill on external displays has been a setting for a long time. The rumored hardware just happens to land exactly on a shape Droppy already handles.
What a hole punch would change, practically
A few honest predictions, assuming the rumor lands as described:
- Nothing about your muscle memory. The top-center of the screen stays the place you glance for state and drop files. That habit transfers across hardware, which is the entire point of building there.
- The menu bar strip survives. The rumored designs keep active display area around the camera, so the extra rows the notch added in 2021 (the story I told in the notch history post) don't go away. They just lose their black interruption.
- Less room in the very middle. A hole punch is narrower than the notch, which is good news for your menu bar icons and mildly interesting news for apps that draw around the cutout. Compact layouts matter more; Droppy's island pill is already content-hugging for exactly this reason.
- Apple's island will cover the basics. If a Mac Dynamic Island ships, expect system-level music, timers and AirDrop progress. The file shelf, clipboard history, and the deeper tools will stay third-party territory, as they are on iPhone.
The shape was never the product
When I started building Droppy, the pitch was easy to misread as "an app for the black rectangle." Five years of shipping taught me what it actually is: the top edge of the screen is the only place on a Mac that is always visible, never owned by another window, and directly under the one pixel row your cursor can slam into without aiming. That's real estate, with or without a cutout in it.
So if Apple retires the notch, I won't be mourning it. The notch gave this category its name and its first audience, and a MacBook Ultra with a hole punch and an island would give it something better: Apple's own confirmation that the top of the screen deserves software. Droppy will be there on day one, because it never left.