Hacker News Reader

Comment by herodotus | Hacker News Reader

My impression is that the design team felt somewhat liberated from Jony Ive's design aesthetic, hence the elimination of the Touch Bar, the return of MagSafe, the SD slot, and (most jarringly to me) the curved under-body. Nevertheless, I welcome the changes (except for the curve).

View on HN

It's wild that he had that much control over their product designs.

I have to believe there were people at Apple who would have opposed the changes. Were they overruled or too scared to speak up?

In product design within a large (or even medium) organization it takes strong institutional restraint to avoid generating camels (horses designed by committee). The way that Apple appears to have consistently avoided that pitfall (for whatever other pitfalls they did fall into) is to heavily empower a single person to make the fundamental design decisions and to be the source of red light/green light for the rest of the designs. Both Jobs and Ives filled that role with varying degrees of success; it will be interesting to see what institutional structure arises with Ives mostly out of the picture.

Remember, Apple is sustaining the one of the highest-cap businesses on Earth, with ~200k employees, on approximately 10 hardware products. That takes an immense amount of focus.

These designs were probably made several years ago, perhaps when Jony was still working there. Also, he was definitely not the only one deciding on the design. Apple’s designers are now working on the stuff that comes out years from now, everything else has already been practically finished.

But why do they then have to go and f##k things up with the damn notch...?

You get more screen estate with the notch, than without it, because they would have taken the entire horizontal space and make it a piano black bar. And because Apple controls the software too, I expect the integration will be good.

I am more concerned about the risk of cracking the screen, because it is so close to the edge now. Does anyone know how important the width of the edge is for the safety of the screen?

I wouldn't think the cracking risk is worse than my 2015 MBP: the glass runs all the way up to the bezel at the edge, which is maybe 2 - 3mm, so not that different to the new machines.

There is a nice symmetry in the fact that all apps/websites will need to take into account safe area insets to display properly on any apple device in all display modes.

That is not true, no app ever gets to interact with the notch on macOS.

If you're in desktop mode, it's reserved for the menu bar. No application can go above that line.

If you're in fullscreen mode, the screen does not render anything to pixels at or above the notched area judging by what early reviewers are saying. In other words, it all goes black and the notch "disappears," with content displaying in a rectangular area.

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

The iPhone is the only Apple device where app developers need to take into account a notch and home bar safe area.

I was just guessing at this, but it seems I might be correct: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/10/19/apps-can-use-full...

Not a big fan of the notch, but I do like consistency.

Good point, I learned this today. It’s not that apps never get to interact above that line, it’s that developers must purposefully use a new development feature to do so intentionally.

I.e., a full screen application that isn’t updated to use the notch area simply won’t, it’ll be a nice perfect rectangle.

I do find the notch disappointing and ugly. But at least right now, it looks like they're hiding it in the menu bar in a way that's not too obnoxious.

I just wish they'd made the notch (and the menu bar) the old menu bar height, instead of almost double the size. Mainly because I think the new height looks a little chunky and unnecessary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com