P.S. Happy down-voting, have a nice day and stay safe.
I'm confused why so many people seem hellbent on convincing me that a notch is a good thing, suddenly. Can't y'all understand that I have a personal preference towards rectangular screens without any holes in them? I admit that it doesn't make the laptop unusable, but IMO it's an unacceptable compromise in a $2k+ machine (that if I specced out, I'd end up paying close to $4k for)
*Citation needed, but it's vastly better then current gen MBP, and good enough for Video calls.
Disclaimer: I don't care about the notch one bit, already order one, but saying that it's needed for good camera is imo stupid. Imo they eanted to add faceid, but didn't have the time, or enough chips to do it in this iteration.
- Have the camera portion of the lid stick out a bit
- External webcam
- Move the "notch" into a corner where it's less obtrusive
- Put the webcam in the laptop base instead
Having it stick out is a no-go because things sticking out of a laptop are at risk of breaking off.
External webcam is something extra to carry around and mount. That's even worse than a dongle.
I don't agree that a notch in the corner would be less obtrusive. And the lack of symmetry wouldn't do the appearance of it any favors.
Cameras at the bottom have been done before and they suck. They're called nose cams for a reason.
Most people. I assume, don't care about the notch.
Also - many people use their macbooks without opening them most of the time.
I’m not excited about the price, but I’d totally take tiny bezels and an upgraded webcam in exchange for the notch. This looks like an excellent upgrade.
It is a use case.
There are different levels of design craft. The more you, as a designer, train your mind and eyes, the more you see invisible things for regular people.
I can spend days in clearing the white space between glyph/kerning of typography and this notch will distract my eyes constantly. Call it OCD or professional deformation, the notch will drive me crazy.:)
When designing you want every visual distraction to be absent from your screen, for example I use 50% gray for wallpaper to have middle gray reference etc.
You cannot compare iPhone UX with Design process UX. When you use your phone, you have a legitimate reason for compromise. When you use Pro labeled hardware you expect all Pro use cases and Pro UX to be respected.
Don't get me wrong, I like the overall design (even the redesign of the shape of the keys), and there is no doubt that this are top-notch monsters. But for my use-case this is no go.
> I can spend days in clearing the white space between glyph/kerning of typography and this notch will distract my eyes constantly. Call it OCD or professional deformation, the notch will drive me crazy.:)
As an aside, most designers I know use external monitors. Do you find yourself doing this type of work on your laptop display?
Guilty as charged (Two Eizos), but I work outside the office regularly, or in the weekends when "inspiration" strikes.
What is the point of Pro laptop when I cannot perform my work at a maximum UX comfort.
Another use-case is that I develop my photos on the go, so on, so on.:)
I am still partially in the Apple Ecosystem (mainly due to C1) so by the looks of it I will have to transition to something different.
> Idea: Write a utility to add in a software bezel for folks like this. We can call it distraction free mode. We'll take the extra space back and replace it with a black bezel. The webcam and front facing utilities are now within that space. You can toggle it on and off.
My first reaction was this idea also. I am sure that as we speak someone is firing up Xcode and it will be available if Apple approves it:)
I'd be surprised if this isn't an OS level option.
This can't possibly be the case, though. There are infinite Pro use cases and trying to respect them all would result in a confused and inferior product.
I'm not saying that your reasons for disliking the notch are wrong, or that they should have the notch. But they're working within certain constraints -- there's just no way to fit a decent webcam into a laptop screen without making space. As someone who's recently been trying to help his fiancee pick out a laptop, where said fiancee's primary criterion is that the laptop webcam shouldn't suck, I empathize with the decision.
The main target audience of MacBook Pro started with designers, writers and musicians (just looking on the shelf towards my old Titanium PowerBook G4).
There are not so much professional use cases which will agree on removing screen estate and adding visual distraction. Screen estate is the main difference in professional UX.
One of the reasons that I mentioned the Framework laptop is that a small company can get super-close to professional audience when searching pro solutions with common sense.
The Mighty Apple with trillions in bank cannot come-up with something "innovative" and chooses the "trade off" approach?
Do you think having money means Apple never has to make tradeoffs? There are always tradeoffs. It's just not possible to make a good webcam that exists in the tiny space at the top of an ultra-thin screen with ultra-thin bezels. Most manufacturers just make terrible webcams, including the Framework that you've brought up as a good alternative (which has much thicker bezels besides).
That's one way to go. Another way is to make space for the webcam. Apple can't magically throw money at every conceivable problem until it disappears.
You don't have to buy one of the new MacBooks. I suspect that most designers aren't going to have as much of a problem with it as you're suggesting, though. Outside of full screen most folks won't notice it after a while, and when you go to full screen Apple adds a black bezel anyway.
Maybe they could consider, you know, not dogmatically pursuing ultra-thin bezels for their own sake?
> and when you go to full screen Apple adds a black bezel anyway.
That's good to hear, but that then entails entirely removing a chunk of vertical screen real estate - which is already at a premium (relative to horizontal) with widescreen aspect ratios. Contrast with the Framework (or, similarly, the Pixelbook), which doesn't need to do that and boasts a 3:2 aspect ratio to improve upon that vertical real estate.
I’m confused. Do you want design aesthetics (no notch)? Or do you want more vertical real estate (less bezels + a notch)? Having both would be the best. But given we can’t have that, if you were in charge of the MacBook Pro design, what would you choose?
Because they more than make up for it with the 3:2 aspect ratio.
> Do you want design aesthetics (no notch)?
Don't care about aesthetics.
> But given we can’t have that, if you were in charge of the MacBook Pro design, what would you choose?
Bigger top bezel and - ideally - a 3:2 aspect ratio.
- Machine 1 has a large top bezel and no notch
- Machine 2 has a tiny top bezel and a notch, but the pixels to either side of the notch are disabled in software (and never used). The part of the display thats enabled has identical geometry to machine 1.
Aesthetics aside, aren't these machines identical in every way? You have a strong preference for machine 1. Why?
Because Machine 2 offers nothing of value over Machine 1 - only more complexity and more opportunities for hardware and software issues.
You seem to have a misunderstanding of the new screen? Apple is reducing the bezel around the screen to provide you more screen space. How do you handle front-facing utilities like a webcam when you use up all available space? Their solution is to surround that area with a small boundary (the dreaded notch).
You can see that the Framework Laptop you cite has a large bezel around it to provide that top bar. You have less screen area here.
From the screenshots, it looks like programs running in full screen mode are pushed down to leave that top area, to give you your distraction free experience: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-14-and-16/
I mean, what would you have preferred, exactly? If they had stuck to a 3024x1890 display, no one would have had the slightest complain, but it would be unequivocally less than what we're getting. Again: the notch is located outside of the same 16:10 screen every other MBP has.
I have a Motorola with a notch and I find it's mildly noticeable and annoying. It's tolerable because it's a phone and I don't necessarily care about screen real estate maximization for a media consumption device (and because this phone is a temporary daily driver while I wait for my Astro Slide to finally ship), so I'm slightly more forgiving of e.g. the constraints on visible notification icons or the fact that Android's network traffic indicator is dead-smack in the middle and therefore "under" the notch (i.e. entirely useless unless the phone's in landscape mode).
For a laptop, it's different; judging by my workflow at my previous job (wherein I used a Mac), that'll almost certainly do funky things with either long lists of menu bar options or long lists of status bar widgets, and will almost certainly do funky things with full-screen apps that have buttons at the top of the screen. It's telling that all of Apple's full-screen productivity app screenshots on that page are on the 16-inch, which doesn't have the notch (EDIT: or maybe it does; hard to tell from the renderings); all the renderings of the 14-inch either have stuff like Zoom or show the apps as windowed. The one rendering of the 14-inch running Photoshop demonstrates pretty plainly that PS' menu bar items are right up to the notch; if a program uses more than that, what's the behavior? All items get squished? Items at the end go to the other side of the notch? Items get hidden entirely "under" the notch and become inaccessible?
GP's right, on all counts. The fact that said GP got downvoted into oblivion for daring to express a totally reasonable and legitimate opinion is disappointing, to say the least. And meanwhile, I've been overwhelmingly happy with my Framework, which doesn't resort to such gimmicks like notches and even boasts a superior 3:2 aspect ratio for yet more effective screen real estate. The M1 in these Macbooks is interesting and tempting, but a Mac Mini would readily scratch that itch just fine at a fraction of the price - especially if I'd have to use an external monitor anyway to prevent any interference with applications by that notch.
No, but all those little things you've installed that put up a menu bar item on the right add up - I'm sitting at a cafe on my laptop right now, and the menu widgets come to pretty much the center. If I unhide the less-frequently-used ones that I hide with Bartender then they're covering 5/6 of the width of the screen.
I am an artist and spend a lot of time with Illustrator in fullscreen mode, with no visible menus. It'll be pretty annoying to have this thing jamming into the middle of my work area. Especially given that I think I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've used the cameras hiding in the frame of my previous Macs. Anyone playing games will be annoyed by it too.
Hopefully they will not make this same move in the next round of Airs, as that's what my next computer's probably going to be.
My guess is that for these situations and for full screen games, you’ll see the screen size reduced by the notch height. And if not, I’m sure there will be an extension that makes the menubar a black rectangle.
Not optimal, but there are ways around the notch, if it bothers you too much.
They hinted at this with some of the screen shots they showed:
I don't know enough about MacOS GUI development, but I'm guessing if an app requests a full screen display, it gets told the resolution is the resolution minus the top, and that's just blacked out.
I am pretty sure it does the latter.
Mind you, if it is a problem, who knows how long it'll take adobe to actually fix it.
Most of the arguments are in the full screen hiding the notch with a black title bar. What if you don't use it FS all the time? The notch would be right where two windows overlap, unless you manually resize both windows every time. Every day for 8 hours+ for everytime you open a code editor
Extra screen real estate is great, but I am sure they didn't have to go all the way to top. The point is getting moot because now the chins are unusable space as well all the time.