The notch is such a wildly stupid idea I can't even begin with it. I actually kinda liked the direction they were going with the keyboard Touch Bar... but they killed that.
I was watching someone code in vim on a new mac the other day and the notch covered part of the first like of their editor! Like how does this not completely break you as a human. Maybe I'm a little OCD idk.
Isn't there just like an option to change the resolution and fix this? Apple should really have a "disable notch" mode.
iPhones have the same problem. Ever played a fullscreen game and had part of the UI cut off into the notch or island. Yep, it's a problem.
Having just the rectangular screen means not having the option of making those things visible, or having a smaller screen.
I put "downside" in quotes because the alternative is just not having those vertical pixels at all, and having the screen end below the sensors.
The notch is wider than need be. As far as I can tell the main reason is aesthetics. But I agree, it is better than nothing
Notch: Camera, ambient light sensor, and a camera status LED
Dynamic island: camera, infrared camera and flood illuminator, proximity sensor, and an ambient light sensor... also half the width and height
Most applications do not handle this well, and I'm willing to bet that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.
I can see the allure. If you're a default macOS user with the menu bar not set to slide up when not in use, that space nicely fits. Problem still remains for fullscreen apps though.
And it's not even really a hardware problem. Apple could fix this in software. Just make using the unsafe region an opt-in for developers instead of the default. You want to paint in the unsafe region, call NSAllowUnsafeRegionResolution(). Boom done. By default, when the menu bar isn't shown, expose a rectangle to the viewport.