Ask what the MacBook notch does and, for the first couple of years, the honest answer was that it holds a camera.
That was the whole list. macOS drew the menu bar around the housing, the internet made its jokes, and everyone moved on.
Five years later the list is real. Some of it is native behavior Apple never bothered to advertise, and some of it comes from a small industry of notch apps, one of which (Droppy) I build. Here are twelve things the notch can do in 2026. The first four are free and built into macOS. The other eight need an app, and I will name which app does each, including when the best answer is not mine.
Four things macOS does on its own
1. It adds screen instead of taking it away
The panel on a notched MacBook is taller than a standard 16:10 display. When Apple shipped the redesigned MacBook Pro in 2021, the 14 inch model came in at 3024 by 1964 pixels; a plain panel of the same width stops at 3024 by 1890. Those 74 extra rows are the menu bar strip flanking the camera, territory older MacBooks never had. Your apps still get the full 16:10 rectangle underneath, so nothing was taken from you. I wrote a longer piece on why the notch exists; the short version is that Apple grew the screen upward around the camera instead of punching a hole in it.
2. The pointer slides behind it
Push your pointer along the menu bar and straight at the housing. It does not hit a wall; it slips behind the notch and comes out the other side, as if the black region were a tunnel. Apple decided the cursor should behave like the notch is not there, so horizontal travel across the top of the screen never snags on it. That single decision is why mousing from the Apple menu to a status icon on the far right feels normal instead of broken. Once you notice it, you will spend a dumb minute driving the pointer back and forth. Everyone does.
3. It can letterbox any app that misbehaves
Some older apps draw toolbars or content into the top strip without knowing a camera lives there. macOS ships an escape hatch for exactly this case: select the app in your Applications folder, press ⌘I for Get Info, and check the box labeled "Scale to fit below built-in camera". Relaunch the app and the entire display shifts down for it, rendering everything below the camera as if the notch never existed. The checkbox only appears for apps that have not declared themselves notch-aware, so if you cannot find it, the app does not need it.
4. Full screen makes it vanish
Click the green traffic light or press ⌃⌘F and most apps take over the 16:10 area while the top strip goes black. On the mini-LED MacBook Pro displays, black pixels are genuinely off, so the strip merges into the bezel and the notch simply is not there anymore. Videos, games, and presentations get a clean rectangle with no cutout. This is also the cheapest cure for hating the notch: live in full screen and you will rarely see it. If you want it gone all the time, my guide to hiding the notch covers the permanent methods.
Drag a file at the notch and it opens like a mouth, holding a shelf you can AirDrop or drag from later.
Play something and album art grows beside the camera, expanding into full transport controls on hover.
Live activities count down and surface your next meeting beside the camera, the way the Dynamic Island does on iPhone.
Jot a thought into the notch and it syncs to Apple Notes through iCloud, waiting on your phone when you leave.
Four of the eight app-powered jobs the notch takes on, grouped by what you reach for.
Eight things apps turn it into
Everything from here on needs third-party software. The mechanics are the same in every case: the app draws an invisible window around the housing, listens for a hover, a drag, or a system event, and uses the space beside and below the camera as a stage. Here is the map.
5. A drop zone for files
Drag a file toward the notch and it opens like a mouth; drop, and the file sits on a shelf until you need it somewhere else. This is the feature Droppy started with, and it changes the shape of multi-step work: collect attachments from three different places, park them at the top of the screen, then drag the whole pile into an email in one motion. Most shelves can AirDrop straight from the tray too. NotchNook and The Boring Notch ship file trays as well, so if a drop zone is all you want, there are options at every price, including free.
6. Clipboard history under the housing
Clipboard managers usually live in the menu bar or behind a hotkey; Maccy is the classic free one. The notch version puts your recent copies in a strip right below the camera, which sounds like a gimmick until you notice your eyes already rest there. Droppy ships a full clipboard manager as one of its core pieces, and Atoll includes one as well. Copy a few things, flick through them at the top of the screen, paste the one you need. Of the twelve items on this list, this is the one I can no longer work without.
7. Media controls with album art
The gateway drug of the whole category. Play something in Spotify or Apple Music and the notch grows album art on one side of the camera and a small visualizer on the other; hover or click and it expands into full transport controls. The Boring Notch and NotchNook both built their reputations on this, and both still do it well. By 2026 it is table stakes; every app on my comparison page ships some version of now playing. If music control is the main thing you want, read the roundup before paying for anything, because the free options are genuinely good here.
8. Live activities: timers, calendar, and your next meeting
iPhone owners know the pattern from the Dynamic Island: a timer counts down beside the camera, the next meeting surfaces a few minutes before it starts, a calendar peeks out on hover. On the Mac, all of it is app territory; Apple has never brought live activities to the notch itself. Alcove leans hardest into this style and is very good at it. NotchNook added timers and a to-do widget in its 1.6 release. Droppy runs timers, calendar, and reminders up there. If this is the part that appeals to you, I wrote a full guide to Dynamic Island style setups on the Mac.
9. Volume and brightness HUDs that stay out of the way
Press a volume key on a stock Mac and a chunky translucent overlay lands on top of whatever you were doing. Notch apps replace it with a slim indicator that hugs the housing: tap brightness and a thin bar slides out beside the camera, then tucks itself away. Alcove built much of its reputation on restrained, native-feeling HUD work like this, and its take is still the most minimal. Every major notch app now ships some form of HUD replacement, Droppy included, so this feature alone should not decide which one you buy. It is usually the first thing people notice, though.
10. Screenshot and recording status next to the camera
Capture tools are a natural fit for the spot next to the actual camera. Droppy puts a screenshot editor behind the notch: take a shot, mark it up, pin it below the housing so it floats over your work while you copy details out of it. Start a voice recording and the live status sits in the notch while it transcribes on the fly, so you always know the mic is hot. The general principle matters more than any single feature: status that lives at a fixed landmark is status you actually see, instead of a menu bar icon you long ago learned to ignore.
11. AirPods connect popovers
Open an AirPods case next to an iPhone and you get that satisfying connect card. The Mac never got the same treatment; pairing is a corner notification and a menu bar checkmark. Notch apps fix the theater. Droppy plays a connect animation in the notch when your AirPods attach, battery status included, which turns an invisible system event into something you can actually see. Trivial? A little. But it is one of those touches that makes a Mac feel like it was designed in the same building as the iPhone, and it costs the notch nothing to host it.
12. Quick notes that follow you to your phone
The top of the screen turns out to be a decent place to jot things down. Droppy's notes sync with Apple Notes through iCloud, so the thought you type into the notch during a call is on your phone when you leave the desk. The full Droppy Notes guide explains the editor, the dedicated sync folder, and the boundaries that protect rich Apple Notes content. NotchNook has notes as well, though they stay local to the Mac. Neither replaces a real notes app, and neither is trying to. The point is capture speed: the notch is always on top, always in the same place, and opening it is faster than finding a window. Write it down, close it, keep working.
Where that leaves you
That is the honest state of the notch in 2026: four native behaviors Apple shipped and never marketed, plus eight capabilities that exist because developers decided a camera housing could be a landmark. My advice is boring. Try the four free tricks first, since they cover most day-to-day friction, then pick one app rather than three; they all want to own the same pixels.
The notch started out as the most mocked region of any Apple display. It ended up as the only part of the Mac screen with its own software category. Not a bad arc for a camera holder.