Bartender 6’s new pro feature turns the MacBook notch into a dynamic peninsula

The battle for the Mac menu bar has raged for decades, and shows no signs of letting up.

As the number of apps and controls in the menu bar have continued to proliferate, users have had to constantly find ways to keep them in check. For years, the de facto solution was the Mac app Bartender, but after an awkwardly managed ownership transition in 2024, a slew of alternatives sprouted up to take on the venerable utility and vie for the crown.

The team behind Bartender has continued to plug away, however, and the latest release is Bartender 6, which not only continues the app’s legacy of menu bar management, but also extends into an interesting new area: the omnipresent notch of the MacBook.

Bartender’s menu bar management is about the same as it has always been.

The menu bar management options haven’t changed much from Bartender 5 to 6; you’ll find all your usual options, including the ability to customize layout, behavior, and look and feel.

There’s also beta feature called Widgets, which lets you make your own menu bar items with a plug-and-play interface that feels like a combination of Shortcuts and Yahoo Pipes. It’s interesting but feels more than a little underbaked at present; I had a hard time getting it do anything that it was supposed to do, including simply showing the current CPU usage. With some more work, it might be more competitive with the likes of SwiftBar, but right now, it’s a beta in the classical sense.

Making your own menu bar icons seems natural for Bartender, but the feature needs improvement.

Bartender 6 is available as a four-week trial; after that time you’ll need to buy a full license for $20, though generous upgrade pricing is available for owners of previous versions. If you purchased Bartender 5 in 2025, you can even upgrade for free. Note that Bartender 6 does require macOS Sonoma or later and that if you do update from 5 to 6, your settings won’t transfer—the developers say this is because of changes in Tahoe, but it’s a shame they didn’t provide an export/import option.

If that were the whole story, it might make Bartender 6 an unremarkable update. However, in addition to all of those features, there’s also Bartender Pro, a $15/year subscription that promises not only all future Bartender updates, but also advanced features, starting with what it dubs Top Shelf.

Shelf awareness

Top Shelf’s default screen offers a pair of customizable widgets.

Top Shelf is part Dynamic Island, part clipboard manager, part file utility. Frankly, much of it also feels like the kind of feature Apple should building itself, because my experience over the last year or two with the notch in the MacBook displays continually makes me annoyed at just how user-unfriendly it is.

To trigger Top Shelf, you bring the cursor up to the notch; the interface expands outward from there, just like the Dynamic Island on the iPhone. By default, the first screen contains a pair of customizable widgets for common features like Calendar, Weather, and Music. There’s also a second media-playing widget called Vinyl, though I’m had-pressed to tell you what the difference between the two is beyond aesthetics.

The media playing controls can work with Apple Music or Spotify directly, once you give them permission, but they’re also compatible with any other media-playing app on your system, including web browsers. I did occasionally find it a bit aggressive about controlling playback from those, including times when it wouldn’t “let go” of, say, a YouTube clip even after I’d closed the tab.

Top Shelf offers two other panes, which you can switch to using icons in its top left when it’s expanded: Files and Clipboard.

Files allows you to temporarily store, yes, files that you might want to move between apps. Drag and drop a file in there and then you can drag it back out of Top Shelf into another app. That pane also has an AirDrop section; drop a file there, and it will trigger the system’s AirDrop feature, with the file already pre-populated.

If you’re going to need that file later, just drop it in the shelf.

Files can store up to six items, and you can clear them all from Top Shelf’s settings, as well as choose how long items stay in the Files palette, define a keyboard shortcut that brings you directly to this section, and decide whether the AirDrop option is present or not.

Clipboard, as you might expect, is a clipboard manager, showing you thumbnails of text or images that you’ve copied. You can choose the max number of items, how long they’re kept for, whether they’re deleted when you drag them out, and even if it will filter out sensitive info like copied passwords. If that’s not enough security for you, Top Shelf’s settings let you pick apps for the clipboard manager to explicitly ignore.

And, in another example of a feature that Apple bafflingly does not currently offer, you can use a single user-definable keyboard shortcut to summon a floating window to search through the Clipboard shortcut and move the selected item to the clipboard. (Alas, however, it does not automatically paste the result when select it—you still have to hit command-v.)

Clipboard history with a single keystroke? What a revelation.

While Top Shelf would seem to make most sense on a notched display, it doesn’t require one. When not in use on my Apple Studio Display, for example, it simply sits in the center of the menu bar as a little capsule-shaped blob, not unlike on the iPhone. If you run a multiple monitor setup, you can choose where it appears with more granularity, including only on screens with a notch.

I don’t find it generally obtrusive, though I will note that on my Studio Display it doesn’t always play well with my use of multiple desktops in Mission Control—really, it should hide itself when you trigger that feature, otherwise it risks colliding with UI elements there and just generally doesn’t look great.

I also ran into some issues on my Studio Display where Bartender would get confused about whether I was trying to hover over the menu bar and bring up my hidden menu bar items or trigger Top Shelf. Some refinement there could be helpful.

Going dynamic

With Top Shelf, however, Bartender also attempts to mimic a lot of the behaviors of the Dynamic Island on iPhones. For example, when you adjust the volume or brightness of your Mac, the capsule expands slightly and shows your changes; it can do the same for battery notifications when you’re charging or the battery hits a specific level.

But more than that, it also works as an area to show what else is happening on your Mac. For example, if you’re playing music, the notch gets expanded just slightly to show a thumbnail of the album art and a waveform animation. If you hover over the album art, it’ll expand to show playback controls.

If you have the calendar widget available, you’ll get meeting alerts at a specified amount of time before, as well as the ability to click and join a remote meeting (assuming you’ve got a corresponding URL in the event). The Weather widget taps into Apple’s own system and can show precipitation alerts.

Top Shelf’s quick-access media playback controls.

A lot of these options are, of course, reduplicative of features available elsewhere in the system. But they are less obtrusive here, in this space that is frankly not being used for anything else, than with, say, your typical Mac notifications. That’s a benefit in the same way as the Dynamic Island in iOS takes the pressure off notifications there.

In some ways Top Shelf feels like a whole new app injected into Bartender—that’s not bad, per se, but I can see why the developers found this a solid way to set their menu bar manager apart from the slew of competitors that have emerged in the past couple years.

Do I use all of Top Shelf’s features? I do not. But that’s okay, because I don’t use all of Bartender’s features either. I appreciate that, in either case, there’s a broad level of customization available, so you can really just use the features that you want.

Notch your best work, Apple

The first MacBook with a notched display came out in 2022 and four years later, the company’s approach seems to remain just pretending it doesn’t exist. Menus that run into the notch simply get shoved to the other side. Menu bar items that don’t fit on the right hand side often just seem to vanish. Apple may be trying to improve matters with its new menu control API in macOS Tahoe, but the result has been lackluster thus far, to say the least.

To the Bartender team’s credit, its Top Shelf feature does what Apple already does on the iPhone and, more importantly, should have done all along on the Mac: embrace the notch. Turn it from a weakness into a strength.

There’s an element of Top Shelf that feels like the old adage about skating to where the puck will be. Even if Apple does end up building a Dynamic Island like feature into macOS—and that’s no guarantee—it will surely not offer everything that Top Shelf does; in that way, it feels a bit like the team behind Bartender is trying to Sherlock-proof themselves. And if Apple never goes there, well, then Top Shelf can claim that island all to itself.