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Comment by flerchin | Hacker News Reader

The notch is an abomination.

I don't understand the anger/disgust at the addition of new addressable pixels to the left and right of the camera. The remaining screen area has the same aspect ratio as before, the entire extra space is black during full screen video, etc.

Would you prefer a screen where the areas to the left and right of the camera were black plastic/glass instead of pixels?

It's pretty simple - we've been using rectangular screens since forever. With rectangular screens there are no compromises within our software and there are no compromises in our field of vision.

Obviously, the notch stands out. It juts into the rectangle, making it no longer a rectangle. The OS now must make all sorts of compromises and implement extra functionality and options (like compatibility mode). And they aren't working perfectly [0] (LOL - And for what? A thinner fucking bezel? There's plenty of bezel beneath the dock - they should have shifted everything down.) The users must make compromises as the size of usable screen area actually changes depending on what mode the application is in. With the notch, if you use any apps that have a long list of menus your eyeballs must now be trained to skip over the notch as you scan the list of top menu items. The whole thing is a byzantine nightmare.

Most people get this immediately and they don't like it. In all the comments on all the articles and forums that I've read - the vast majority of people don't like the notch on this Macbook and they don't like it on the iPhone either. However, they do put up with it and learn to ignore it given that they have no choice if they want to stay in the Apple ecosystem that they're probably locked into anyway.

Lucky for me - I'm somewhat of a minimalist on my smartphone. I can still buy a new iPhone without the notch (AND with a home button which is way better for quickly switching apps) because I don't need the greatest camera. For my computers, I'm not locked into any one platform but a Mac would certainly be my last choice because of this kind of garbage.

[0] "Apple’s new MacBook Pro notch is misbehaving. Early adopters have discovered inconsistencies in how Apple handles the notch across macOS and in individual apps, resulting in unexpected behavior where status bar items can get hidden under the notch." - https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/27/22748371/apple-macbook-p...

The edge-to-edge Mini LED display is magnificent.

The notch is an abomination

Hundreds of millions of iPhone owners seem OK with it.

Well, if you're even remotely attached to iOS ecosystem (which I think many iPhone owners are), you're unlikely to switch to another brand of phone.

Which means you're stuck with the notch, and you need to learn to accept it.

> and you need to learn to accept it

Or you just... don't care about it, because it doesn't matter.

I can accept the notch if the OS is smart enough not to render stuff behind it. Don't look at the notch as missing screen estate, look at the strips of display next to it as extra screen you'd normally never have.

For now, the OS doesn't seem to be prepared not to render stuff behind the notch. That's a really obvious flaw that'll hopefully get patched out soon if Apple is worth their salt.

>the OS doesn't seem to be prepared not to render stuff behind the notch

Really? UIKit has been successfully dealing with the notch for a long time, I assumed they would have updated AppKit with the same logic ("safe areas") way ahead of introducing notches to macOS. Have you seen examples where it's not working?

Quinn from Snazzy Labs posted a video detailing the buggy nature of the notch on twitter [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/SnazzyQ/status/1453143510111059968

Holy shit! I wonder if this is something to do with some app devs not using the APIs as intended and it not mattering until now, but that seems so unlikely - surely the population of the menu bar is nigh-inescapably standardized (edit: double-unlikely, considering the battery icon example in that thread). It's always so disheartening to see screwups this obvious in the Apple ecosystem. The upside of their dictatorial style is supposed to be the absence of things like this.

The OS is smart enough to not render stuff behind it. You can test this by clicking a dragging a menu bar icon across the notch - it will immediately jump to the other side and not try to render a drag animation.

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