Hacker News Reader

Comment by have_faith | Hacker News Reader

Can't believe they did so many positive changes with the MBP only to add the notch from the phone in too. Almost the perfect update. Does this mean every app in full screen has to be updated to account for it?

> posted in wrong thread so copying here

View on HN

Maybe I've drunk the Apple Kool-Aid, but there's another way to look at this: it's a perfectly rectangular 16:10 display, plus they've added an extra (albeit imperfect) strip along the top, 74 pixels high, allowing them to push the macOS menu bar into the bezel, leaving you with a clean and unencumbered 16:10 desktop area for your content.

This is a good framing.

It is not a loss, it is a pure gain.

That makes me happier, but it's a deep gash into an otherwise perfect rectangle. It's a little like the buying a brand new table (or car) and the first thing you do is accidentally put deep gouge in it. Perfectly serviceable? Yes. But still needlessly marred for the life of the product.

It's function over form. Exactly what people always say Apple should focus on.

Speed holes? -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whnms4CLJys

Yep!

I don't see much issue with having a notch on a laptop since it now lives in the middle of the menu bar now. That's typically negative space in most apps anyways.

For my full screen web browser it's right where the tabs go.

I was going to answer "presumably this is why Safari has always put tabs below the address bar", but the most recent version finally changed that by default. :\

No it's not. In previous iterations, your tabs went below the camera. This doesn't change that.

Not sure I understand your distinction, the screen is taller now, if my browser wants to render to the top of the screen it has to contend with the notch.

If your browser changes nothing, the top bar will be blacked out and your tabs will display exactly as before. This only changes if your browser explicitly updates to handle the notched display.

It sounds like they're saying the OS will automatically add a black bar to the top in fullscreen mode, which will look seamless thanks to the contrast rate of mini LED.

If that is the case, it sounds like a pretty elegant solution and significantly reduces my concern about the notch. It also addresses my confusion about some of the images on Apple's website.

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

I can’t believe they didn’t color the menu-bar black to hide the notch.

I suppose the notch is only in the way if you are watching 4:3 video in full screen. For every other use case, the notch is hidden in either the menu bar or black, horizontal bars.

I’m also wondering if the led backlighting is arranged so that backlight is completely turned off in the black horizontal bars shown when viewing 16:9 video in full screen.

>I’m also wondering if the led backlighting is arranged so that backlight is completely turned off in the black horizontal bars shown when viewing 16:9 video in full screen.

That would likely help a lot, very interested to see it in action.

I wonder how it will work with a mouse. What happens when you’re hovering the menu bar and go inside the dead area? Does the cursor disappear and return on the other side? Making the dead area unvisitable (so the cursor keeps following the border) seems the most logical solution probably, but it makes it very awkward to go from one menu item to the next if the notch is between them.

No, remember that the notch extends the display upward, and does not expand downward into the display. Apple's reasoning is now you get a 16:10 display without having the top menu bar enroaching within it.

Which I'm perfectly fine with. Useless black area made useful.

Is MacOS also going to restrict all apps that run full-screen to the 16:10 display area and not the strip?

If they have done that, it's fine.

But even then I can think of a bunch of people who buy MacBooks to run Linux.. it's going to be a showstopper for them.

Isn't that space just menu bar 99% of the time in Linux also?

The Apple Event showed that full-screen apps and videos have a black bar extending the whole notch height; which still leaves you with an Apple standard 16:10 screen area. Since it's mini-LED, it'll be just as black as the previous bezels, and since the non-notch area is still 16:10, you're not missing anything at all; and the menu bar in a sense "doesn't take any usable space" anymore.

Nit: mini-LED is not the same thing as micro-LED, so it remains to be seen whether the LEDs are small enough/aligned in such a way that the black bar at the top doesn't have any backlight bleed.

(Maybe this was mentioned in the presentation...)

The funny thing is I checked the webpage to make sure I got it right, but still copied it wrong.

Ha!

Thanks for the correction

They did announce a very high contrast ratio so hopefully it won't be too bad.

That portion of my screen on my Mac has been a solid grey square with no meaningful information for 99.9% of the time that the laptop has been powered on. The aspect ratio is 16:10 so it’s not going to get in the way of any 16:9 content. I feel like this is a pretty bad take. Would you prefer a solid black bezel?

By default full screen apps do not use that space. It remains be black.

I suspect there'll be a setting to have the notch area ignored for full screen apps by default, or something like that.

Not a huge deal for me, I dont notice it on my phone, I dont expect I will on my new Mac either.

> Does this mean every app in full screen has to be updated to account for it?

A simple black bar in full screen apps would be sufficient I guess.

I wonder. Maybe full screen will behave differently and the menu bar will never be hidden?

Otherwise I am looking at my web browser in full screen and how do you design around that? You have to push the tabs down anyway, might as well just make the menu bar static.

You could get clever and have apps program around it as a dead zone (tabs jump either side of it when moving them around) but sounds like a pain.

I can’t believe they’ve done that either. I’d honestly consider getting one, but I can’t stand notches on any device.

And I’m sure we’ll see everyone else start to copy this “feature”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com