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Comment by dont__panic | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Icing on the cake: an incredibly specced Framework laptop is less than the starting price of the 14" MBP. And it has a 4:3 display ratio. And I can choose my ports!

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)

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I think everyone would agree the notch isn't good. But it's a tradeoff. Do you want a decent webcam? That's apparently the price we have to pay.

That's absolutely bonkers. I can think of 20 different ways to provide a decent web cam without having a notch in the screen. I would have preferred for them to leave the webcam off entirely before I would have ever settled on such an absurd solution.

I'd love to hear some of them…

There was nothing wrong with how it was done before.

- Thicker top bezel

- 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

Thicker top bezel is the only viable one. But just at a glance it looks like the bezel + notch height is about the same height as the current bezels. I don't really see either option as necessarily being better given that.

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.

My 3y old samsung has 3mm hole in display for camera that is better then this one.

*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.

Then go buy a laptop without a notch, I'll happily take the extra screen space that's usually wasted by the menu bar anyway.

>I'm confused why so many people seem hellbent on convincing me that a notch is a good thing

Most people. I assume, don't care about the notch.

Also - many people use their macbooks without opening them most of the time.

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