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Comment by shantara | Hacker News Reader

Everything they’ve said about the new MacBook Pros is extremely promising, but they had to add a notch to the screen. Just why? All for the sake of reducing the top screen border by a couple of millimeters.

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Try this: Instead of thinking "Boo, they took away part of the screen with a notch" think "Yay! They extended the screen a few mm on either side of the camera"

If you want to join us in the cult of Mac, learning little contortions like that will make you a lot happier.

I remember naively asking on the Mac forums once, whether there was any way to have the laptop lid closed in Mac OS without putting the laptop to sleep.

Of course not, I was told. Apple's laptops use a superior thermal design, which could damage the laptop if the lid is closed while it's left running. Who would want to do that anyway? Better to have good cooling.

I didn't even bother to reply and mention the fact that my Windows install on the same laptop allowed it without complaint.

What? Of course you can run the laptop with the lid closed, it’s called clamshell mode.

This was in around 2012, maybe attitudes have changed. This isn't my thread, but shows what responses to the question were like at the time: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2805582

Mac laptops have supported clamshell since at least 2000.

You only have to go a few responses into that thread to get an explanation that the action of closing the lid will trigger sleep, but an external keyboard and mouse will wake it back up, allowing for the machine to be used while closed. You may not have originally intended to make the distinction between having the lid closed vs. the process of closing the lid, but it's clearly the former you were worried about, and that use case has always been supported.

For whatever it's worth, I've run my MacBook Pros in "clamshell" mode (e.g., lid closed, connected to an external monitor and keyboard) all the time -- I did it with every work Mac laptop I've had and with my personal one back when I was using it as a desktop. I know there's lots of "never do this with a MacBook it will overheat!" advice out there, but it was just never an issue for me, and this was across enough different devices and generations that I don't think I was just consistently lucky. Are you describing something else, e.g., closing the laptop lid without connecting an external display and preventing it from going to sleep?

I never had an issue with that when I was using Windows work laptops, either, except that I recall both ThinkBooks that I had seemed to have about a 50% chance of a full kernel panic style crash when I unplugged the external display. This was back when ThinkBook was an IBM brand, though, and IIRC I was running Windows XP on both.

This was back around 2012, and it looks like not sleeping when the lid is closed is officially an option in the power settings now, so it sounds like things have changed. Although I don't think overheating was ever a real problem in the first place. With my 2012 MacBook Pro when the screen is closed, the air from the vents can still escape out behind the screen.

I remember clamshell mode working in 2006. Didn’t use it much though, was afraid it would fry my Macbook Pro. You could boil an egg on the first Intel Macbook Pros.

But it takes the menu bar space, which is already scarce even without the notch. Some people may have many app icons and "widgets" (e.g. iStat Menus) on the menu bar.

Agreed on this point.

Why not?

I hated the idea when it came around for the iPhone - but actually using one showed me that it just isn't an issue. There's a status bar at the top anyhow, and the center of it is unused.

On a laptop, I see it as just extra pixels dedicated to the OS's status bar.

Update:

>macOS Hides the Notch on New MacBook Pro in Full-Screen Mode

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/18/macos-hides-notch-on-ne...

I take back what I said about the notch. It is not as bad, as it initially seemed to be

The notch occupies otherwise wasted space in the menu bar - how is that not purely positive?

Well, unless you’re only ever using text edit, the menubar is there for er, menus? It’s going to be interesting to see the gymnastics around this

There was at least one shot of it -- it'll be a gap in the menu, with top-level menus flowing around the notch if necessary.

It’s not really clear what your point is. There is plenty of room in the menu bar for the camera to be in the middle.

Is there? Photoshop has a bunch of menus, not sure what they're planning to do. See this screenshot for example:

https://i.imgur.com/hHEl3cN.png

I did notice Xcode used up all the space before the notch:

https://imgur.com/a/Qlxr7t2

And apps that don't have a traditional Mac menu just have a black bar hiding the notch:

https://imgur.com/a/McNBTHY

I actually don't know what Mac OS does today when it runs out of room for menu items.

Menus are positioned by the OS, presumably they won’t collide with the notch. There is no problem.

I bet there will be software adding a black line, hiding the notch tomorrow so no big deal. Those are additional pixels anyway.

They basically showed that in some fullscreen images in the demo, so I think that's how it'll be.

Top-Center is among the most useless screen real estate. It takes just about the same amount of space as the keyboard language selector a bit to the right, or any one of the menu items to the left. And those two interface never fill up to the point where they need that center spot (or I'd be cleaning out those mostly annoying gadgets top-left).

The vertical screen space they might have freed by adding a notch was immediately taken by increasing the top bar height. I don’t see a purpose for such a trade off.

You still end up with more usable space since now the menu bar isn't taking up those pixels.

>Top-Center is among the most useless screen real estate.

Especially on MacOS. 100% like this design - good camera, smaller bezels, useless space being cut out.

More smudges on the camera, since this is where the user grabs to open the lid, and the camera seems to be closer to the edge.

Not to mention - how do you cover the camera to maintain privacy if its now part of the screen ?

I don't understand. Was your camera cover extra wide or why would this be different now?

My Thinpak P1 has a moveable mechanical shutter I can move to physically block the camera lense. I don't see how you could do that reasonably with a notch design.

Before that on previous laptop models I used a post-it note or a piece of paper held in place with a clothes pin.

With the notch design you can't do that either without blocking parts of the UI!

> With the notch design you can't do that either without blocking parts of the UI!

I thought I was following until this part. Why couldn't you just put a post-it or whatever over the camera itself? There are no pixels where the camera is (although I would be surprised if this is not something under active research).

Oh, looking more closely the notch is actually quite wide - yeah, that might be doable to fit a post it over it. Still a lot less maneuvering space for that than on a normal laptop.

I'm sure someone will leap in to correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think the LED "camera on" indicator is purely hardware on modern MacBook Pros -- you can't override it in software -- and I doubt that's changed with this one. So I'm not sure how big a deal this would actually be in practice.

(I would probably go for a bit of black electrical tape if I were really worried about that, though.)

The camera is pretty much in the same place?

Top centre is where Gnome Shell on my Fedora install shows time, notification indicator and application notification icons (hexchat, Steam, etc.). Hardly an useless part of the screen!

But it doesn't work on my non-standard OS that wasn't designed for the hardware!

MBPs are designed for macOS, if other OSes do other things with the hardware, that's on them. Why should Apple care when probably 99% of their users (if not more) are exclusively using macOS on the hardware with other OSes in VMs?

Can you make Gnome Shell do something else, then? Or if you don't want the extra pixels, I'm sure you could arrange it so that your OS does not use them.

Sure, you can move the clock and indicators, but it's the default place for them. Also not sure about eq. fullscreen applications.

If I were to hazard a guess, it's more of a brand recognition thing - now you don't even have to see the apple on the back to know someone's using a macbook.

> If I were to hazard a guess, it's more of a brand recognition thing - now you don't even have to see the apple on the back to know someone's using a macbook.

The intuition driving your hazarded "guess" is unerring.

A recent leaker called out the notch which brought renewed attention to a different leaker, ty98, who mentions notch (and other details) as early as August. [0]

Coupled with confirmation of ty98's leak that there is "No "MacBook Pro" logo on the bottom bezel", the MacBook Pro notch may very well be a branding element.

Instant visual recognition without using words. The notch is branding that transcends language.

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/17/apple-notch-design-obsc...

It's a macbook though. You can just write a program that moves your screen down a millimeter or however much and live your life notch free with peace of mind.

It sits where the menu bar is anyway. Similar to the status bar on iOS.

I agree. I finally upgraded from a Iphone SE to a 12 Mini. The notch is horrible and I’m not sure why people wave it away with “I got used to it”. I’ve had it for months. No idea what lunatic at Apple thought it would be nice for a laptop.

Can’t they come up with something a little more original than removing screen real estate to stand out?

I will be switching back to an SE just based on how overall unwieldy the new phone is. The notch is just one of the nails in the coffin.

The notch to me says, “now I know which products not to buy”.

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