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Comment by lwhalen | Hacker News Reader

What is up with the gigantic notch? Deal-killer for me, personally. My Intel MBP works just fine so long as I disable Intel TurboBoost.

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The screen protrudes up into what would otherwise be a solid black bezel on either side of the camera notch, making the screen area taller than 16:10 aspect ratio.

The OS puts menu items and icons in that bonus space, freeing up _more_ of the uninterrupted rectangular main body of your screen for your apps.

I think if you go into fullscreen mode with an app, it'll blank out the area to either side of the notch and just use the main screen space (or maybe that's configurable for notch-aware software to decide? IDK)

I never notice it. It's usually dead space of the menu bar. I agree that it is a strange design, but I don't think it should be a deal killer for anyone.

The only thing that's in there is a very low quality webcam and an ambient light sensor so as far as I can tell it's 90% empty black space.

it's not magical, but if Apple's 1080p camera is 'very low quality', I have plenty of experience on potato-cams to talk about, even in the previous generation.

I also suspect that the design was intended for Face ID, but that obviously hasn't happened yet. I'd keep touch ID, thank you very much.

We’ve seen the actual camera/sensor module and its mounting hardware. It is pretty close to the size of the blacked out area in the menu bar.

That notch is a very clever way to expand the size of the screen without increasing the size of the case. There is very little downside. that middle part of the menu bar is not used by most apps. When there are more menu items, the system automatically skips over that notch.

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