Comment by notorandit
5 months ago
The real point for me is: where were all Apple Egineers when the decision ws taken to add (or actually remove) that notch to the display? Have then been called in at all?
I can hardly think that the decision came from the engineers: that would not solve any technical problem or add any extra technical feature. Just whoes.
The decision likely came from the marketing.
Fancy and stylish decisions (the nothces) on engineered stuff (the Mac) should require the former to beg the latter for a go/no go badge.
I think you can put a camera in any of the 4 corners in a bezel, you can put it (back) in the middle of the upper bezel, maybe in the middle of the lower bezel.
Or ask you Apple fans to use their iPhone as a camera.
Look at where they put cameras in a Tesla. Not where it is nice, but where it is effective under all the points of vieew.
To me the notch is totally useless also in my phone as it doesn't add anything. It rather makes some of my screen real estate unavailable. Just to get a slimmer bezel which is not a useful feature.
I would rather sacrify some of the bezel to get back my perfectly rectagular display without any rounded corners (another pesky marketing-driven decision) or nothces. Meh!
While I doubt anyone at Apple wants to keep the notch forever, I imagine the engineers justified the notch as adding screen real estate, and rightly so. The display's size ratio is 1728:1117, which is slightly taller than the 16:10 of the older displays—taller by exactly the size of the notch, in fact. So while it's a bit unsightly, it does serve the functional purpose of allowing them to raise the "ears" of the monitor about the size of the menu bar[1].
Prior to owning this Mac, I always set the menu bar to autohide, which wasn't the greatest UX but gave me some extra screen space. Now I can keep the same space and have the menu bar always visible. Seems like a win to me.
[1] Yes, they could have just made the top bezel bigger and had no notch, but that would have have meant having a smaller screen or a larger footprint for the laptop. I don't like the notch one bit, but I think they made the correct choice.
>I think they made the correct choice.
Do you understand how much harder layout is when its not on a rectangle?
The notch is not the problem. It's free real estate, as the meme says. Older models, and most other laptops which ship a webcam (frankly essential in this day and age), just have dead space the size of the webcam. I'd much rather have a notch and more screen, Apple did the right thing here.
The problem is shipping the notch and not making the menu bar icon layout aware of its existence. That's just lazy, and it's appalling they haven't fixed it yet.
> Just to get a slimmer bezel which is not a useful feature
I would much rather have more screen real estate.
And if you need to have a perfectly rectangular display you can just make your apps full screen.