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Comment by milesokeefe | Hacker News Reader

Have you used an iPhone X? The notch actually makes a lot of sense once you've used the gestures associated with it, same with how it integrates into apps. I'll agree that they've made a lot of mistakes in their product lines recently but the iPhone X was not one of them.

Well, sparing software. I've had intermittent phantom screen input using the latest betas on the X, making it infuriatingly unusable at times.

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I get that you can swipe down from the left or the right. But obscuring a chunk of the screen is not something to aspire to. The notch is clearly a compromise to make room for hardware. They should have found a way to fit the hardware such that it doesn’t cutaway the screen.

Nothing wrong with incremental upgrades.

cutting away a portion of the screen is not an upgrade. it's a sacrifice.

And bad design choices lead to further bad design compromises. Now when you go view a website in landscape mode, the browser adds unsightly white bars on either side of the screen [1], breaking the immersive edge-to-edge continuity, for no other reason than to accommodate the notch. Ugh.

1: https://twitter.com/thomasfuchs/status/907764896829452288/ph...

The iPhone X has a much better screen-to-size ration than the iPhone 7/8. Therefore, it is an "upgrade". The notch would only be a "downgrade" if there was already a phone (and more specifically an iPhone) on the market that had an edgeless display without a notch. But there isn't one, so I'm not sure I see your point.

A notch breaking the continuity on the screen is a downgrade when, prior to, the screens had nothing protruding into them and blocking out a chunk of them.

Immersion was their goal with the thinner bezels. The notch hinders immersion in instances such as browsing with Safari in landscape mode where solid-colored padding is added on both sides for the sole purpose of compensating for the notch. The notch also draws attention to itself. They missed the mark.

Don't get me wrong the notch enables novel functionality. But they should have figured out how to do it without blocking out a chunk of the screen.

Sure, it's less immersive than if there wasn't a notch.

But unlike you, I have actually used the iPhone X extensively and I find the experience incredibly immersive. I have done the same with the Samsung Galaxy S8 and I find the iPhone X more immersive - yes, even with the notch.

Unfortunately I can't afford either, so I have a OnePlus, but if I could, I'd get the X.

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