Restart your Mac when it helps. Not before.
Fresh Notch sits beside your notch and watches uptime, memory pressure, swap and waiting macOS updates. Most days the dot stays faint and the answer is “all good”. When something is wrong, it says what, and whether quitting one app would fix it.
For macOS 14 Sonoma or later. 14-day free trial, no account.
Quit one app before you restart the Mac
Most “a restart fixed it” stories are really “quitting the leaking app fixed it”. Fresh Notch follows each app’s memory, with its helper processes counted together, and names the one that keeps growing.
It waits to see whether the memory comes back before it calls anything a leak, so Safari’s caches and Finder’s thumbnails don’t set it off. If quitting doesn’t help, then it suggests a restart.
A reminder drops out of the notch, then shrinks back after ten seconds if you’re busy.
It knows when to keep quiet
A suggestion at the wrong moment is worse than none.
Never during a call. Not while you’re presenting, sharing your screen, recording, or using the camera or microphone. Reminders wait until you’re done.
“Tonight” means tonight. Snooze until evening and it waits until you’re back from a break, with a laptop on its charger, before it asks again.
Restart knows what’s at stake. Before it restarts, it shows downloads in progress, a running Time Machine backup and the apps you have open, then lets those apps ask to save, like Restart in the Apple menu.
Not mid-sentence. It won’t suggest quitting the app you’re typing in until you’ve stopped for a minute.
The details
Updates first
When a macOS update is waiting, it offers to install it, since that restart is the one worth doing.
The 49.7-day bug
macOS stops opening new network connections after about 49.7 days awake. Fresh Notch warns you at 45.
Restart history
Every restart, with what it changed: swap, memory pressure and free disk, before and after.
Shortcuts and Terminal
Get Mac Health, Check Now and Snooze in Shortcuts, and freshnotch status for your scripts.
Any Mac
In the notch, as a small pill on Macs and displays without one, or in the menu bar beside another notch app.
On a schedule, if you want
Off by default. Turn it on and it reminds you every 7 to 30 days after your last restart, even when everything is fine.
Lighter than what it watches
An app that tells you your Mac is struggling can’t be what makes it struggle. Measured on a 14-inch MacBook Pro, resting:
Nothing leaves your Mac
No account, no analytics, no tracking. Fresh Notch reads what macOS already reports about memory, swap and uptime, on your Mac. The only thing it sends is a licence check to Polar, about once a week, with your key, your Mac’s name and an anonymous ID for the Mac. Privacy policy
Pay once
Try everything free for 14 days. If you keep it, it’s one payment, with every future update included.
- No subscription
- All future updates
- 14-day free trial
- 14-day refund, no questions
Launch price: the first 10 buyers get the 2-Mac licence for $5.99 with the code FIRST10. Payment runs through Polar’s checkout.
Questions
No. It suggests, you decide. Restart works like Restart in the Apple menu: your apps get to save first, and any of them can cancel it.
No. It never purges memory or kills processes. It reads what macOS reports and tells you when a restart, or quitting one app, would actually help. Most of the time it tells you nothing needs doing.
Any Mac running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. On a Mac or display without a notch it shows as a small pill at the top of the screen, or as an icon in the menu bar.
The dot and the readings keep working. Reminders and the advice to quit or restart pause until you buy a licence.
Yes. In Settings › Licence, choose Remove from This Mac, then activate the key on the new one. You can also free a Mac from your account.
It’s in your receipt email. You can also find it in your account by signing in with the email you bought with.
Within 14 days of buying, write to [email protected] and you get your money back, no questions. See the refund policy.