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Comment by bla3 | Hacker News Reader

For me personally, they hit it out of the park -- except for the notch, which seems like a complete showstopper to me at first sight. Maybe it's not so bad in practice if games and full-screen videos keep that whole strip solid black? But almost all the screenshots are of fullscreen apps, so it seems Apple thinks it looks a bit ungainly too.

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I can live with the notch, but honestly I would pay more for an option to remove it along with the camera.

For me, it really depends on how this camera compares with a standard Logitech C920. If it's as good or better then I'm fine with it, but if it's just a minor upgrade over the terrible pre-existing camera then I'm not sure why they would mar an otherwise fantastic product.

Same. I finally broke and bought a nice webcam. I'd rather just not have one on the laptop than a notch!

Apparently the camera in last year's M1 macbook was already a huge upgrade compared to previous ones, and the new macbook pros have a higher quality 1080p sensor, and both leverage some of the special IP blocks on the chip to make the image even better, so it should almost certainly do better than the C920 (especially around audio capture as well, if you use that)

Interesting. I can't speak to the Pro, but my M1 MBA camera didn't* seem any different from the one in my 2013 MBP. If this camera is actually better than the C920, that's pretty cool.

Does anyone know how an iPad Pro camera compares? I'm guessing that'll be a decent indicator of what the new MacBook hardware is like.

*: I use the past tense because the camera lasted about a month before it randomly died. Now the camera light is always on (or at least it was before I taped over it) and the OS no longer recognizes it. (None of which I really mind, since I was planning to tape over it either way.)

The M1 cameras are not a huge upgrade, they are the same as the ones macbooks have had for years now; they just now make use of the M1's image processing hardware, and even then the improvement is nothing to write home about.

I love my M1 Air but this is one area where it doesn't really shine.

If the 1080p camera is anywhere near the one in the new iMac, it should be better than anything you need.

I wonder how this will work with Apple Calendar or Safari in full screen (with the new iOS 15 compact tabs). I wonder if they are moving to a concept of full screen where the top bar is always visible.

From the marketing images on the website, it looks like fullscreen apps will just have a black bar across the top. Kind of frustrating! The inaccessibility of the top menu bar is the main reason I never use the native full-screen mode on macOS. Since the menu bar is now within the extra added space on top, I hope we eventually get the option to leave it visible.

If for many apps the top part of the screen is just going to be opaque black with no content, then that might push me towards a kind of full screen where the top menu bar is always available.

The new version of macOS allows to show the menu bar at all times, even if the app is in full-screen:

> Full-screen menu bar. You have the option to display the menu bar at all times in full screen so you can easily view the app menu and other glanceable information anytime.

Source: last feature in https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey/features/

Oh, nice! Thanks for pointing that out. Seems a little strange they didn't use that in the marketing shots to show off the extra screen real estate.

It'd be interesting to see a design like Safari 14 with the address bar to the left of the notch and buttons on the right.

Honest question, did you ever use an iPhone with a notch?

In my experience, it kinda disappears within minutes. I barely notice it’s there.

The notch gives us smaller bezels / more screen real-estate. It _kind of_ makes sense.

smaller bezels

Not really, no. The Dell XPS for instance has just as small bezels but without a notch.

720p webcam though, just like the old macbooks. Don't really know how thick the screen is though on either

I suppose it does boil down to how much they improved the webcam. If it's still crap like the old one, why bother with the notch? Just slap a 720p webcam on there in the bezel and ditch the notch.

Sidenote: I think Apple could make a killing selling a $200 4k webcam. The market doesn't have many good options now, and I'm sure many Mac users would buy one.

The original Apple iSight camera (640x480 resolution Firewire cam) was really nice for 2003. It retailed for US$149.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISight

The Dell XPS has, hands down, no joking, the absolute most dogshit webcam I've ever seen. Maybe they need a notch.

And for the longest time they put it in the bottom left corner for a good view up your nose. They also seem to mount the mic inside the fan bearings.

I’d heard about the dreaded bottom camera.

I bought an XPS for my fiancée a few weeks ago. I’d heard the XPS camera wasn’t great, but it turned out far worse than I could have feared. They couldn’t have made a worse camera if they tried. She needs a decent webcam for doing teletherapy, so we had to send it back.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find a laptop that has a good webcam. We’ll probably just get her a MacBook Air, which is at least serviceable in that regard. (I’d get her a 14 inch MBP but she won’t let me spend that much on a laptop.)

Having used many Dell XPS with the webcam in different locations they're all terrible. If a notch is the compromise needed for thinner bezel while retaining good webcam quality that is fine with me. You don't lose any screen space after all. It just means the menubar (which is a real waste of screen space) gets moved up and your "desktop area" is the true rectangular size of the display.

Sure it looks odd but I can see it working very well due to macOS's menubar UI design. On Windows it wouldn't work nearly as well. Interestingly it would work very well on GNOME (with the clock moved to the right hand side) as well!

I imagine most games and videos can be run in 16 by 9 aspect ratio and that'll draw black bars above and below thus hiding the notch anyway.

From my understanding the screen is 16:10 plus the extra space on both sides of the notch.

I hadn't even thought of gaming, but most games I play tend to use the entire screen. Though maybe with a ratio above 16:10 that will be different?

Games have never showed awesome support for Apple's weird decisions, so I guess I would expect some issues there, unfortunately.

Heh, if push comes to shove, I reckon games will have to add support for `safe-area-inset-top`

Complete show stopper? A notch?

It doesn’t seem to bother phone users that much.

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