Meet peeq: the notch, made alive

Since 2021, every new MacBook has had a black cut-out at the top of its screen. It holds the camera. Most of the time, it just sits there, and the menu bar works around it.

peeq gives it a job. Music, calls, notifications, timers, screenshots and files show up right where you already look, and leave as soon as you’re done with them. We call it the notch, made alive.

One rule: out of the notch, back into the notch

Everything in peeq follows the same motion. When something happens, a small glass pill drops out of the notch and tells you. If you want more, click and the notch opens into a full card. When you’re done, it folds back in. Nothing piles up in a corner, and nothing covers your work.

It sounds like a small thing. In practice it means you always know where to look, and you can ignore it the rest of the time.

What it does today

• Music. Now Playing from Apple Music, Spotify, a YouTube tab or almost any app, with play, pause, skip, scrub and volume. Pull the player out of the notch to float it.
• Calls. FaceTime and iPhone calls ring in the notch with Accept and Decline, then show the call time.
• Notifications. Banners arrive in the notch, and you can reply to Messages and WhatsApp right there.
• Timer. Start one with a preset or a swipe; a small ring ticks beside the notch.
• Screenshots and recordings. Copy, save, mark up or delete a screenshot the moment you take it.
• File tray and AirDrop. Drag files to the notch to park them, then drag them out or AirDrop them.

Plus the small things: clipboard history, a volume level in the notch, download progress and battery pills. Here’s the full list.

Designed to feel like it came with the Mac

peeq uses macOS’s own Liquid Glass, SF Symbols and system fonts, and follows your Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency settings. The island itself stays black so it reads as part of the hardware, and only the content glows, tinted by your album art or the colour of what’s happening.

It’s also built to be invisible on your battery. At idle peeq uses about 0.3 % CPU and 37 MB of memory, and it pauses completely while your display sleeps.

Private by default

There’s no account and no analytics, and peeq has no servers. Reply suggestions use Apple’s on-device model, so your messages never leave your Mac. We wrote up every permission peeq asks for, and why.

Try the beta

peeq 1.0 beta 1 is free for testers with a MacBook with a notch on macOS 15 Sequoia or later. Join the testlist and we’ll email you a build. It takes about a minute to install, and the notch walks you through the rest.

If something feels off, choose Report a Problem from peeq’s menu bar icon and send us the file. We read everything.