You don’t need a $3,000 MacBook to get Live Activities in your menu bar
Macworld ·
Macworld One of the big selling points of the new MacBook Pro with PROLED is its inclusion of a Dynamic Island. The camera is just a tiny bit lower and surrounded by display, so instead of a notch, you get an island that’s smaller but just as capable as the iPhone’s. When you run apps with Live Activities on the new laptop, they’ll populate the Dynamic Island, and you can tap or click on them to expand it. What iPhone users have enjoyed for years finally comes to Apple’s most expensive laptop. But it turns out, the Live Activities feature is coming to all Macs. In the macOS 27.3 beta, every Mac gets Live Activities. It’s just for some of Apple’s apps right now, such as Music and Clock, and some system functions like Screen Recording. Foundry Live Activities in macOS 27.3 will appear in the menu bar as small ovals to the left of your icons, just as if there were a camera hole up there. When expanded, a small arrow appears that can be clicked to minimize it (see above). If you run several at a time, they’ll appear as separate instances next to each other. Third-party developers can now start implementing Live Activities in their macOS apps, which was already announced. However, what we thought was just in anticipation of the PROLED MacBook Pro turns out to be a new, useful feature for everyone.