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Comment by friedman23 | Hacker News Reader

This laptop seems to have 0 compromises, I'm buying one instantly.

It has a notch. That is one heck of a compromise.

Is it? I think the notch is just where the menu already is, so it's sort of a moot point. I'd love if my current Mac camera were integrated into the space that I already use for the menu bar.

Some people, like me, have the top menu bar on auto-hide. So, the notch there is definitely not a universally good thing.

I pretty much live in a fullscreen tmux session and a fullscreen browser window so the notch is pretty lame in my opinion, maybe iterm can put some fun stats or a clock there but to me it's basically like 2 lines of lost screen real estate - not enough to dissuade me from getting it since they put the touch bar where it belongs (the trash), added real ports and fixed the keyboard.

From the screenshots and images, it won't impact users like us. When in fullscreen with a hidden menubar, the area left and right of the notch goes black. It's exactly like the current situation in that case, and the only benefit is that when you choose to view the menubar it doesn't eat into the space occupied by the program-in-use.

How is that a compromise? You either have a massive black bar at the top of the laptop, or a small notch that allows for more screen real estate.

I suspect this notch is going to be a problem for a significant number of full-screen applications that never assumed there would be something like that.

Although that'd be probably mostly games, and I don't think notch is going to be a primary issue for those.

It was mentioned in the keynote that you can disable the entire top region of the screen that aligns with the notch. That makes this equivalent to any notchless laptop.

I'm sure old fullscreen apps won't even be told about the new areas at the top of the screen. They'll just think they're on a regular 16x10 display.

I tend to be hypercritical of Apple these days, and even I'm excited about this machine. Removing the touchbar, bringing back MagSafe, useful ports, etc. vastly overshadows the notch.

Yes, in a menu bar you typically can't control and usually has a few icons (battery, wifi, date, bluetooth, VPN) and a few words, something like Outlook, file, edit, view, message, format, tools, window, help).

I watched in side of several apps I used and never saw anything useful in the top center.

I love this take. It's the ultimate HN critique.

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