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Comment by valine | Hacker News Reader

With the iPhone X Apple put serious R&D into a display that folds back on itself for the sole reason that a phone is more ascetically pleasing when the boarders are symmetrical. Even after a year and a half every phone except the iPhone has an asymmetrical chin. Will Apple still be able to make decisions like that without Ive in a leadership position? For Apple's sake I really hope so.

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I'd take asymmetric borders over having a large notch anyday. See S10+ next to an iphone XS Max [0].

It's subjective of course, but strictly looking at display & bezels the "which is more aesthetically pleasing" question is not even close

[0] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NG5Wd9Px40o/maxresdefault.jpg

I don't know that I agree with that considering the S10+ has what amounts to a hole in the top right corner. The notch isn't great but I actually think I prefer seeing those 2 options side by side.

I prefer the hole, for two reasons: A lot less total space of the display is missing, and the part that is missing is one side rather than the middle, so you still have room for a mostly full width uninterrupted status bar.

And if you have no interest in Face ID that's reasonable preference.

Are you saying face ID is so fragile moving the camera 1 inch or less than an inch to the right kills all functionality? You manage to line your phone up so precisely each time you use it?

But it isn't just a camera, its an array of stuff

Not OP, but I believe he's talking about how the iPhone's large notch size is due to additional hardware used by face id. Having that size notch on the left/right side wouldn't be much better than in the center. Personally, I'd rather use my fingerprint anyway.

They have infrared and dot projector, otherwise every phone has mic, speaker, proximity sensor, etc. They chose to stuff everything in the notch, it wasn't necessary.

I am also agree with you.

Notch? What notch? I have an iPhone X and mine has ears which extend the display up into the top of the phone where the camera is placed to get my status bar out of the screen. Brilliant! I say.

This is literally the way I feel about it as well. I’ve seen the ears as increased space rather than the notch cutting into the display.

This is a very weird way of viewing the issue. The space is physically there, but because the size of the phone is ok anyway experience-wise it seems to be an extra feature?

>This is a very weird way of viewing the issue.

It's very weird to call it an issue as well.

I remember what kind of phones we had until 2007. I've used infuriating devices from Android vendors as well.

The notch is not even a first world problem....

Well, depends on how you define 'first world problems'. But again, you should look at other phones today, not the ones from 2007. I thank my god every day that some companies finally had the courage to do original/innovative work to get rid of that. Not all of them will be successful, but honestly, the notch is nothing more than a compromise, and an ugly one at that.

Yeah. Old Casio watches have screens with notches, punches, dual screens, screens in screens... you name it. They’re fine. They actually work well and don’t bother anyone.

The whole point of this thread is how brilliantly elegant Ive's designs are. Yeah, it's all 1st (or 0th) world problems to talk about such issues -- that's a given entering into the discussion, not a reason to shut discussion down.

Well it can be called an issue. I wouldn't call it a problem though.

What we are trying to solve is: We need more than just screen on the front of the phone, how do we solve this?

By having more than just screen? We need a camera, let's have a camera.

"We need more than just screen but don't want to have it visible" is an annoyance at best, not a problem we should be focusing on.

Even design wise, there are several more severe problems with iPhones they could concentrate on...

Now, I specifically clarified that I wouldn't call it a problem.

Issue is not a weird word in development.

There are a lot of actual big problems with your reasoning, but there are more productive things for me to concentrate on.

All I’m saying is that the notch doesn’t FEEL like it removes screen for me, rather ticks away the status bar making the notch “issue” not an issue at all.

So it's an emotional response to something that if you applied some logical thinking to it you might see things differently?

It is an absurd position that your way of thinking is logical while the counterparty’s is emotional. In fact quite dishonest as a rhetorical technique. Less of a notch that is asymmetrical would look worse due to human preference for symmetry, and what the parent said is that the current solution does in fact put the statusbar at notch level. So why does it matter?

I suggest looking at the response the user made to the comment for a different reaction than your comment. Also i didn't say one way was better nor that I looked at it logically, or did I?

Well “logically” I absolutely hated it when it was announced, like it is a ridiculous thing to do.

Actually using it and I don’t mind it a single bit, and that’s all that matters. I bet most people hating on it have not used it more than minutes.

Interesting! Good design is human in nature and may sometimes be against a colder logical approach. I do wonder about brand and identity though but those are harder to look at from a distance.

But it can’t show battery percentage.

Somewhere between 4:3 and 16:9 (usable in portrait or landscape, obviously) seems an optimal screen shape for the vast majority of games and apps. (For a PC, 16:10 seems noticeably better than 16:9)

Going wider than 2:1 doesn’t seem to be adding useful screen space, really

I wish those “ears” were more purpose built, like physical indicator LEDs for microphone and camera access, SSL, etc.

Great idea. There could've been a LED plus hardware kill switch over there.

And what do I do with the parts of the status bar that don't fit on the ears?

On iOS? Nothing, 'cause there is no such thing. The "status bar" shows the battery indicator, the signal strength, and wether you are on cellular or wifi.

On the left, you've got the name of the carrier you are currently using, whos text is scrolling. If it's unlocked, it shows the current time and if GPS is enabled.

That's it.

>"there is no such thing"

Huh?

iOS 12, iPhone X, swipe from top-right to reveal:

Carrier, VPN status, Battery life as a numeric %

... none of which appear in the notch-level "ears". Which is fine (tho were it up to me, I'd prefer VPN status somehow integrated w/ signal strength indicators for cell & wifi).

I'm confused. The carrier, time, battery life, etc, are in the notch ears..

https://i.redd.it/1es9glox9t601.jpg

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you?

edit: that was a genuine question

The comment lists three things. Carrier, VPN status, and Battery life as a numeric %.

None of those are in your screenshot.

This has got to be one of the best quotes that illustrates what I believe to be wrong about everything related to Apple and it's products: the blatant and worrisome repackaging of ideas and words.

I'm not facetious at all when I say: Thank you for this quote. I'll save it and use it all the discussions I'll have on the subject from now on. It has really added a key-puzzle-piece to my understanding of the Apple-mindset.

The "notch" (Who came up with the term anyway? I don't believe Apple actually identifies it with a name.) is most definitely meant to be a notch: when applications are full-screen the notch will actually "eat" a part from your screen. This was shown since day 1 of the introduction where a phone was on display with the Wonder Woman movie full-screened and HDR activated. This is Apple's intended and expected behavior. It's Apple's choice to put the "notch" front and center, not to hide it with software and even set up guidelines to ignore it in application development.

Personally, I have an issue with notches and I will never own a device that has one. I find it a lazy, ugly and uninteresting way to increase the screen to body ratio of phones. But I'm somewhat glad with the current experimental designs that are being released by other manufacturers. It's refreshing to see different takes on the issue wether by popping up camera's, flipping over camera's or now even hiding camera's under the screen. Now that is innovation, that is design, that is actually looking for a solution for a very difficult problem. Instead Apple chose to put the "notch" front and center and to ignore it even going so far as to almost market it as a feature. Because look at all the high-tech stuff you get because of it. Sorry, I'm not buying it.

And this shows the incidious marketing that Apple partakes in. It redefines words and ideas on an active basis:

- A motherboard isn't a motherboard, it's a logic-board. It does exactly the same thing, it is exactly the same thing and even is produced in exactly the same way as motherboards. But somehow the brand on the shell makes it different.

- A Mac is different from a Personal Computer and as Louis Rossman has indicated a Mac can "regress" into becoming a PC. How is this possible, it does the exact same thing, is build in the same manner, uses the same technology and serves the exact same purpose.

- An "App" is basically a term that collects all the things that are software-y. A deamon? That's an app that runs in the background. A service? That's an app. A compiler? That's an app. A game? That's an app. A script? That's an app. A shell? That's an app. Etc...

- A repository with a gui suddely is an app-store. No, it's a software repo with included DRM for free.

- Durcing the introduction of the then new "earpod" design of the corded headphones that statement was made that they were engineered to guide audiowaves into your ears. Gee wiz Batman, what are all the other headphones doing then?

- The CE Iphones were "unapologetically plastic". So they are just plain and simple plastic. Just like all the other manufacturers out there.

- The famous "I'm a mac and I'm a PC" commercial is so obvious that it almost hurts. No, they both are PC's; they just look a little different.

This repackaging of words and ideas is a very worrisome trend. It muddies the water when it comes to definitions of words and it eventually will lead to the muddying of the truth. Not only that, but if we accept this sort of repackaging with our PC and phone hardware; why should we not accept it in other aspects of our lives? Why should there not be alternative-facts, when there are alternative PC's? It's a mechanism in our psyche that is prone to abuse and therefore we should not partake in it, even if it maximises profits.

It's all actually pretty simple, look at the definition of the word and if all of it applies; it sticks. How you feel about that does not matter.

I wish I could triple-vote your post. The redefinition of words, the abuse of language, is Orwellian.

> but if we accept this sort of repackaging with our PC and phone hardware; why should we not accept it in other aspects of our lives?

But most of us already do - in politics this redefinition of words is common. "Oil companies" become "energy companies", etc etc.

> It's a mechanism in our psyche that is prone to abuse

The hardest thing to change in an person is their identity. If someone's identity is tied to a particular belief (the earth is flat, my deity can throw bolts of lightning, etc) then anything that contradicts that belief is either ignored or else spun to fit the existing belief system of that person.

it's a funny chain of consequences. put a notch, now the bottom border is too thick, so you thin it up with a very expensive manufacturing process. if you had not a notch there, there would have not been a need to move away the chin to maintain visual symmetry.

anyway even with most manufacturer producing notch design, I still find no benefit that entices me to move to a notch model for a feature that adds a total of 44 pixels rows at twice the selling cost to maintain visual border symmetry, but I understand there are people obsessed with aesthetics that are willing to part a sizeable amount of money for a symmetrical bezel.

It appears I'm just not the target audience of apple anymore.

A symmetric bezel is literally the only selling point iPhones have over phones half the price. Really.

yes? android can do:

phone calls

internet browsing

apps

heck, I can use firefox and ublock on android, so iphones look even worse feature wise from here. they look good and cost a lot and that's it.

even the app quality argument holds little value today as there's not many app today that aren't just cross-compiled

plus, a billion of little cuts, like not being able to download an mp3 and use it as alarm or ringtone, having to use safari for sites that use webgl, having skype etc to open link into safari forcing every time a copy paste etc etc.

iphones aren't bad experience as long as you commit to every single defalut they pick for you. outside that, they're pretty and they're expensive.

three years ago the tech gap in the hardware itself was enough to justify the price, with even high end androids having wholly inadequate performances, and I had iphones all the way up to the 5s, but that's irrelevant now, with even the midrange android beefy enough to go trough every application you can throw at them with ease.

Next time, read the comment you reply to before starting into a rant.

Both of you think Android > Apple.

And iPhones received security updates for 5 years (60 months) vs the typical 18 months or leas on Androids because carriers suck.

> because carriers suck

I'm conflicted on this topic. on one hand carriers are acting like total trash about android security. on the other hand people aren't forced into a lease and can get a vanilla android one device from a lot of different vendors and enjoy faster upgrades from the vendor and extended upgrades from projects like lineageos.

I think the root cause is the general populace voting with their wallet in a way that doesn't align with the best practices as seen from a more security conscious mindset.

however this issue intersects weirdly with budgeting and upgrading frequency. bar consideration on used market depreciation, one iphone purchase can get you 3 midrange android phones, so for the same budget you'd be more or less on the same os "freshness" for a comparable period of time, so to say, with increasingly better hardware and fresher batteries (because if you take 5 years as a iOS device lifetime you'll be hit by battery and subsequent performance degradation, likely twice), and of course if one has the budget to change device every year the issue disappears regardless of the platform.

as long as one can avoid carriers devices, I guess.

I think of phones as a 3 year replacement cycle. Though I am in year 4 with my 6s now. I get the manufacturer's original warranty plus the additional 2 years of repair or replace from my American Express card. One upside of keeping longer is that I am personally contributing less to the e-Waste problem than if I went through an Android phone per year.

So ballpark math, a $900 iPhone XR would be covered by either Apple or American Express for 36 months and cost me $25/month to maintain. I effectively run a leasing program for myself inside my small business budget.

OS?

I'm lucky enough to be on Android One, so the only contact point I've with Android OS is the notifications and every now and then the settings app, everything else I've replaced, from the launcher to alarm application to the browser.

People care of iOS mostly because they're forced to interact with iOS bundled apps daily and well, if you compare those bundled app with the mess that's on non Android One devices Apple comes on top, but there are other choices.

Privacy? Have you read what Play services sends home?

I prefer the notch and no chin. These design decisions are difficult but ultimately the iPhone X was an impressive phone . The S10 is a nice phone too, to me both look good in the photo. Jony Ive has contributed great work to the design of mobile / personal computing products. Today I smile walking into a tech store and ooogling at the surface book, XPS and Lenovo. Peer pressure has improved the design across the board. I’m a 20+ year apple customer and recently my 2 year old mbp went in for some restoration work. First time i’ve had to use Applecare. For a company like Apple outsourcing design seems similar and counter intuitive however from an objective perspective I question design choices. My 2012 MBP has a tidier appearance to my 2017 MBP which requires many dongles and adapters. To me that is a bad design. So it might be that Jony is more responsible for design problems and this is it for Apple.

I see no "notch and no chin" device in that picture. If anything, S10's "chin" looks smaller than iPhone X's "no chin".

How about decisions like removing the headphone jacks from the company's most popular music players, the very devices with which people are supposed consume the media-centric services that Tim Cook and analysts say are the future of Apple?

For Apple's and consumers' sake, I hope NOT.

This decision was promptly copied by every other major phone manufacturer, for the same reasons Apple made the decision. The 3.5mm jack is obsolete and getting rid of it enables a better, tougher device which is more waterproof.

Its not obselete when 100s of millions of people use it everyday and the replacement is expensive, needs replacing because the batteries die and has poorer sound quality.

No phone is more waterproof with it than without (they all have complex data ports with many connection vs three or four in a jack). No phone has a bigger battery. No phone is tougher.

It allows Apple and others to sell expensice Bluetooth ear buds.

And yes, I do own a pair of airpods.

The iphones have been waterproof since the 7 I think. The 3.5mm connector isn't waterproof, the lightning connector evidently is.

Android phones have been waterproof with 3.5mm jacks, for at least the past 5 years, maybe longer.

I don't know about other manufacturers, but the latest Google Pixel 3a & 3a XL which comes with the 3.5mm jack, aren't waterproof.

https://www.teamandroid.com/2019/05/16/google-pixel-3a-water...

Yes, and other manufacturers make phones that are waterproof. Just one example: Motorola moto x4.

Most milspec phones have been waterproof for a long time. Kyocera has a group of phone models (named Hydro) that are/were waterproof, although they aren't very impressive or popular, and rely on caps with gaskets.

It was also recently reversed by Google for the Pixel 3a. I'm hoping other manufacturers follow suit. It's fine to admit a mistake and many have been made in phone design recently.

It blows my mind how people call things obsolete without replacing all of their functionality. The only reason the 3.5mm jack is considered obsolete is because Apple said so. Literally nobody had any problem with it existing up until the day Apple announced that iphone. If this isn't the definition of sheeple then I don't know what it is.

Acting like I’m the Luddite because I don’t want to breastfeed 25 battery powered peripherals. Next they’ll say MagSafe was obsolete.

The largest non-Apple player in the industry, Samsung, continues to ship flagship phones with a 3.5mm jack and with waterproofing that has been consistently ahead of the iPhone. Samsung Galaxy has been IP68 since the S7 in 2016. Something the iPhone didn't achieve until the XS & XS Max.

The idea that this was about waterproofing is a fabrication.

I guess it's not as super obvious as it sounds, but if you take a look at a 3.5mm audio jack, it's not that hard to imagine creating a hermetically sealed (and therefore waterproof) female plug for that specification.

Far easier than for a USB port, I'd say.

Apple is a trendsetter and nobody can deny that. That doesn’t make the headphone jack an anti feature. I use a 6S to this day when I could get a XS, for the headphone jack and smaller size/weight.

Apple manufactures bluetooth headphones also [0] .. do the math. The really popular Beats headphones for example are made by Apple indirectly. By cutting off the headphone connection, they are encouraging people to buy new products instead of using old and proven technologies.

Apple has done this all the time during their history, eg. look at the whole adapter situation where you just have to buy extra hardware to connect your new device to anything.

[0] "Beats Electronics LLC is a subsidiary of Apple Inc." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beats_Electronics)

> encouraging people to buy new products instead of using old and proven technologies

People who are not stupid are actually encouraged to switch to a competitor who is less anti-consumer.

And this is where whole "ecosystem" comes in. If you switch, you will either have to replace all of your devices, or have inconveniences while using them together.

Or maybe a lot of people don't care and actually prefer wireless headphones? What's with the ad hominem attacks?

If you look at broad consumer trends and attribute them to stupidity, you’re going to have a hard time understanding markets.

I don't think Ive departing from Apple would be entirely a bad thing, though. Most of Apple's really great designs are thanks to Jony, but some of their really stupid ones (e.g the horrible butterfly keyboards) have his fingerprint on them too.

I have never heard of nor noticed the chin difference of iPhones before. I don't see how the loss of attention to detail at that expense would materially impact Apple, except maybe for the better.

I often think with apple people either get what they care about or they don’t.

I own the most recent iPad and iPad mini (on that now) and I like both but neither more than my Nokia 6.1.

All three are functional devices that do what I need with little to no fuss.

The tiny aesthetic differences between them are lost on me or more accurately are irrelevant to me.

Which is why I don’t have an iPhone, for tablets apple are hands down the best but for my phone needs a Nokia running stock android at one fifth the price does 99% of what I care about.

I have zero loyalty to a brand or a platform, I use whatever works for me at the time I guess.

> With the iPhone X Apple put serious R&D into a display that folds back on itself ...

You're kidding right?. Apple put so much serious R&D into the display that they asked Samsung to create it.

Samsung is contracted for the manufacturing but that doesn't mean Apple didn't come up with large portions of the design or otherwise find and support the project

Couldn’t figure out what you’re referring to with the notch. Can you show some illustration of this or something to read?

Here's a good explanation: https://www.redmondpie.com/why-most-2018-smartphones-have-ch...

Bloody hell, that's amazing. I had no idea.

That's fascinating, I had no idea.

I commend them on their willingness to see this design decision through, yet I wonder if it is actually good design.

The article already mentions it makes the phone more expensive and I do wonder, if it does not make the phone also harder to use? At least on my android, I already find the chin on the smaller side and with big hands it gets harder to grasp the phone at a part where I don't accidentally trigger something on the display. I would guess it would also strain my thumb even more when trying to tap stuff at the bottom of the screen. From looks alone, more display is always gorgeous, but from a usability standpoint, I am not so sure.

I've never accidentally activated anything with my palm on my iPhone X or XS. I think Apple just has superior palm rejection (see also their massive laptop trackpads)

aesthetically, i think you meant, as ascetically means something very different.

I thought it was a nice pun

I have literally never noticed that. If this is what the differences between phones have come to today then to me it seems like there isn't really anything to write home about anymore and the market is completely saturated.

Love them of hate them, Apple has always spent a lot of attention to details in their products.

I myself like them more just because of their manufacturing processes. It’s like those YouTube channels that have videos of industrial machinery showing how tomatoes are sorted or paper clips are bent.

here you go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQIYZ-iKuG4&feature=youtu.be

ascetic: n. A person who renounces material comforts and leads a life of austere self-discipline, especially as an act of religious devotion.

boarder: n. One who pays a stipulated sum in return for regular meals or for meals and lodging.

given their recent focus on being a services/media company, it wouldn't surprise me if they moved out of hardware entirely at some point in the future.

I bet you $100 that’s wrong

This is mistaken, Apple sells devices and the software comes with; it’s a key selling point. Yes they expanded their services sector, because product is getting hard to push — but it will always be the core business.

It's unlikely they will move out of the market which gives them the most recognition as a brand and accounts for a disproportionately high % of their revenue.

The services are to sell more to the people in their hardware ecosystem.

Their "focus" in services/media is because the # of iphone customers has plateaud, so now they are now growing by selling more to the same customers, not selling the same to more customers.

They became the most valuable company in the world by selling hardware. What on earth would possess them to get out of that incredibly lucrative market in which they have an unparalleled privileged position??

I think you're more right than people are giving credit for. They clearly haven't cared much about their hardware with any true innovation for a long time.

Jesus that's thin gruel to bring up..no? How about some actual innovation? Has anything truly innovative happened in smartphones for the last decade?

How many can keep affording expensive phones line iPhone X and planned obsolescence?

I think the reason why now only the iphone has symmetry is patents.

Symmetry is not patentable.

Doing the fold under the oled screen is.

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/5/16/15646918/a...

https://www.cultofmac.com/266383/apples-wrap-around-display-...

Which lets apple create a symmetrical bezel, while I think almost every other manufacturer has some sort of asymmetrical chin in their phones.

Personally, I think focus should be on battery life improvement, app management UX, privacy (for example, to this day I can't turn off ALL notifications) etc. I would take 20% thicker iPhone for 20% better battery life and headphone jack any day. Cosmetic changes and thinness-for-thinness sake are worthless.

You would but vast majority of Apple customers would not. There are often calls to "vote with your wallet" and that's what people do. This is why we have no jack and thin phones.

Given that Apple doesn't offer superior phones (with better battery life and headphone jacks), voting with your wallets essentially comes down to getting a Apple one or a non-Apple one.

In other news, the iPhone's market share is dropping like a stone. http://fortune.com/2019/02/21/apple-iphone-sales-2018/

It is important to note that it is dropping a lot _in China_. Chinese smartphone market is very different from the rest of the world as a smartphone is basically a WeChat machine. Chinese also value novelty and camera capabilities more (by camera capabilities I mean stuff like auto beautification).

Not only in China, though - I'm in Europe, and I see people making the switch in growing numbers - even for the teens, that 2000s "I need to have the newest iPhone" hype has waned and now Samsung & Co. are being considered more.

iPhone omnipresence is pretty much an American phenomeon ... I've seen more iPhones in Vegas in one day than I see in Germany in six months.

According to some stats I have found[1][2] it does not seems like there is any exodus, if anything it seems that iOS gains market share every December (gifts?) and then loses a bit over the year, but the number has been stable since forever.

There are definitely less iPhones in Europe than in US, but that is more of a reflection of the global trend. iPhone was dominant in US because for a long time they had a carrier subsidy system that made it not worth it to buy a phone on a plan for less than $450 (because you paid the same price no matter the price of the phone). Back at that time that's what an iPhone cost.

In Europe the subsidies worked differently so the price was a more important factor.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/461900/android-vs-ios-ma... [2]: https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-v-ios-market-share#germ...

I got one of these fucking things, and I noticed my thumb feels strained when I use my phone. It's because my thumb has to bend down a lot further to reach the bottom of the "chin" all the time.

So much for "design is how it works", huh Steve?

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