Comment by tiltowait

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.