Using CoinNotch on a Mac without a notch

The name CoinNotch leans on the notch, the camera housing carved into recent MacBook displays, so a fair question is whether the app is useless without one. It is not. The notch is just a handy location beside the menu bar, not a requirement. Here is exactly how CoinNotch behaves on Macs that have no notch at all.

The short answer

CoinNotch is fundamentally a menu-bar app. On a MacBook with a notch, the ticker sits in the menu bar right beside that notch, which looks tidy and purposeful. On any Mac without a notch, it simply sits in the menu bar as usual, exactly where every other menu-bar app lives. The live price, the color-coded moves, the multi-coin watchlist, the alerts, all of it works identically. You are not missing any feature, only the specific visual placement next to a notch that does not exist on your machine.

Which Macs this covers

This includes Intel MacBooks from before the notch era, MacBooks running an external display, desktop Macs like the iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro, and any Mac mirroring or extending to a monitor without a notch. CoinNotch runs on macOS 13 and later on both Apple Silicon and Intel, so as long as your Mac meets that, the absence of a notch changes nothing functional.

So if you were holding back because your Mac has no notch, there is no reason to. The app was built around the menu bar first, with the notch as a nice placement bonus on the MacBooks that have one. To get started, the setup guide applies to every Mac, notch or not, and the pricing page confirms it is free.

Frequently asked questions