Field notes

Does your Mac need a notch to use a notch teleprompter?

Short answer: no. And no, Apple does not make a teleprompter app either. The longer, better answer is that Tellie gives any Mac a notch worth having, and works on any display you plug in.

Does your Mac need a notch? (No. In fact, Tellie gives it one.)

Two questions come up constantly from people setting up to record on a Mac: does Apple make a built-in teleprompter app, and do you need one of the newer MacBooks with a notch to use one?

Apple does not make a teleprompter app, and you do not need a notch. Tellie is the Mac teleprompter built around the notch, but it runs on any Mac, notch or not. If your MacBook Air or Pro has a notch, Tellie tucks in around it. If it does not (an older MacBook, an iMac, a Mac mini or Mac Studio, or any external display), Tellie sits at the top-center of your screen just below the menu bar, in the exact spot a notch would be. Same features, same experience.

Here is the fun part, though. The real answer is not just “no, you don't need a notch.” It is “no, and Tellie gives you one anyway.”

Notchify any monitor

Think about what the notch actually is on the Macs that have one: a few pixels of dead space around the camera that Apple gave you and left empty. Tellie turns that space into something useful, a quiet strip for your script, your Keynote notes, or a status line.

And it does that on any display, not just the ones Apple decided to notch. Put Tellie on an older MacBook, a Mac mini driving a monitor, an iMac, or a 27-inch external panel, and it creates a working notch in that top-center spot: a slim, always-there second screen exactly where a notch would be. So the corollary to “you don't need a notch” is a nicer one: with Tellie you can notchify any Mac, and any monitor, and finally put that piece of the screen to work.

The notch stops being a hardware feature you either have or you don't, and becomes something every Mac can have.

Notch-native vs. the full-screen kind

Most Mac teleprompters are full-app prompters: you open a big window, it fills a chunk of your screen, and you read from it. That works, but it comes with trade-offs that a notch-native prompter like Tellie is designed to avoid. A notch-native teleprompter is:

• Smaller. It is the size of the notch, not the size of a document window. Your script sits in a slim strip, not a panel competing with everything else on screen.
• Out of the way, and right by the lens. It lives at the top-center of the display, next to your camera, so your eyes stay on the lens instead of drifting down to a window lower on the screen. That is the difference between looking at your audience and visibly reading.
• A menu-bar app. Tellie lives up in the menu bar, not in your Dock and not as a window you have to manage. It is there when you want it and invisible when you do not.
• Able to float over any app. Detach it and Tellie floats over whatever you are doing, Zoom, Keynote, a browser, your script over your slides. Full-app prompters generally want to be the thing you look at; Tellie is happy to ride on top of the thing you are actually working in.
• Nearly transparent, if you want. A background-opacity slider fades Tellie down to a faint whisper of text over your work, or solid when you want it bold. Most full-app prompters are an opaque panel and nothing else.

And because it is notch-native, it is invisible to screen recording and to Zoom by default, so your script never shows up in the take or on a shared screen. That is not something a normal window can do.

The notch does more than hold your script

Once a teleprompter lives in the notch, the notch becomes useful for more than reading.

• Keynote, hands-free. Turn on Presenter Magic and your live Keynote speaker notes appear in the notch as you present. Finish a thought and Tellie can turn the slide for you. Your notes are right by the lens, and your audience never sees them.
• A glanceable status line for developers and agents. Anything on your Mac can push a line to the notch through the tellie:// URL scheme, or the @tellie/mcp and @tellie/cli tools. A build finishing, a test failing, an AI agent reporting what it just did, all in your sightline without a window stealing focus. More in the developer docs.

Reading a script is just the start. Once the notch is a place things can appear, the strip you notchified becomes a second screen your Mac never had, working for you whether or not Apple ever cut one into the glass.

Oh, and it listens

The reason to put a teleprompter in the notch at all is that Tellie does not just scroll. It listens on-device and follows the words you actually say, waiting when you pause and keeping pace when you speed up or ad-lib. Mark the points you cannot afford to miss and it checks them off as you cover them, and it warns you before you run out of time. (Some folks have started calling it the TelliePrompter, which we will happily take.)

Notch or no notch, that is the part that changes how it feels to talk to a camera. There is more on how the voice following works in why your teleprompter should follow your voice.

Questions people ask

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