Think of them as something that allows the overall screen area to increase, as bevels shrink.
And then when the corners of the screen are so close to the corner of the laptop, and the corner of the laptop is rounded, it looks weird if the corner of the screen isn't rounded. Like a square peg in a round hole.
Fortunately, it's all context-dependent. So when you watch a video that is inherently rectangular on a Mac, that takes precedence. It's only shown below the notch, and the rounded corners on the bottom disappear.
So it's kind of the best of all worlds. Bigger screen with round corners for actual work (the notch is not particularly objectionable in the menu bar), slightly smaller screen with rectangular corners for video (and games too I assume?).
And I don't about you but I don't hold the screen half of my laptop. Not unless the laptop is closed. So I don't see how that's a concern.
Is the similarity of the word the only reason they often get mixed up? I think another factor is that flat surfaces surrounded by an angled bevel are fairly common. For example. I just noticed that the bezel of one of my monitors is also beveled.
And the other comment about wasting screen space is funny. Yeah we need 1mm of extra phone screen space when 60% of most webpages are covered with ads (separate problem but still amusing in combination).
You want more bezel. Screens with less bezel have less overall edge protection and will break easier due to opening or closing forces or impacts.
Bezel-less screens are fragile pieces of junk.
Another was when my kitten bit the edge of the screen. It didn't even leave a mark but it was just enough concentrated pressure at the edge of the screen that it killed it.
Now I'm a lot more careful, but thank goodness for Applecare.
The rounded laptop corners is a similar design decision. And also it doesn't look weird to me at all compared to rounded corners for windows, especially when they introduce visible desktop garbage in those now-not-perfectly-covering-rectangles corner areas
It's an actual objective fact of life.
You don't get a larger 15"/16"/17" inch screen. You get a screen that size minus the notch because of a psychotic obsession with thinness. And then they struggle to compensate for that with barely working workarounds in software that don't cover even half of cases.
The notch makes for a smaller menu bar but without the notch there would be no menu bar there, it would take the space underneath instead.
Yup. We never had camera before the notch.
> The notch makes for a smaller menu bar but without the notch there would be no menu bar there
Yup. Before the notch we neither had a menu bar that could comfortably fit most menu items even in professional apps, nor did we have a camera.
BTW, you literally are saying "The notch makes for a smaller menu bar". Imagine if I wrote that as the first sentence in my comment, then there would be no misunderstanding
Also my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44909996
Personally, I've never run out of space in my menu bar, So the notch gives me 1cm of extra screen space.
It's nothing to do with thinness. It's about packing the largest possible display into the laptop's width/height. Sure, you could argue to just make the laptop 1cm higher for that bezel, but then why not add a notch and get 2cm of extra screen height?
That perceived 1cm is largely meaningless for content. And you get less space in the top menu bar.
> Personally, I've never run out of space in my menu bar
I have 27 icons in my menu bar. Not because I collect them, but because quite a few apps add their icons there and I use a few of them.
On the laptop screen it manages to show 10.
IntelliJ idea has 12 top-level menus (I swear they had more). On a laptop the top menu bar manages to show 10 items on the left of the notch, and has to move two more to the right. This both splits the menu for no reason, and reduces the space for icons even further.
The notch has been around for 4 years now, and Apple still hasn't provided a solution for the problem they introduced.
And, of course, when you want to truly take advantage of "more content" you can't because the "safe screen space" without the notch is still squarely below the notch, and apps have to to be very careful to actually use that, or the notch will get in the way.
> It's nothing to do with thinness.
Yes, it does. In this case with thinness of bezels.
> Sure, you could argue to just make the laptop 1cm higher for that bezel
Yes, you could do that if you didn't have an institutional psychosis about thinness everywhere.
Luckily I have mostly used Macs on external screens the last few years. But it ticks me off every time I actually use a MacBook as a laptop.
It's actually optional, the functionality is built into Mac OS (just check "show all resolutions" in display setting and pick the notchless resolution). You get that bezel you want, along with the full menu bar.
> Yes, it does. In this case with thinness of bezels.
Device thickness is not the same thing as bezel thinness. If you make a phone/laptop thinner, all you get is less battery life. If you make bezels thiner, you get more display area.
As a lot of people told you, you can just disable it. I've been doing that for 4 years, just set your resolution to a 16:10 ratio and you're good to go. The resolution is exactly the same as it was before they introduced the notch
Personally I like the fact that Apple gives us the choice. I dislike the notch and prefer my menu bar below because I use apps like intellij. My wife likes the notch and keeps it. So, both of us can have what we want.
Maybe Apple could have made it slightly easier to disable it by having an option instead of choosing a 16:10 resolution but, to be honest, most of the people who dislike it tend to be power users who can figure it out.
If you want to avoid the extra space, it's as easy as using a 16:10 resolution size. The menubar will drop down to the 16:10 space.
To change it you have to first display the hidden list by enabling a “display resolutions list” toggle.
That is not something a “I love Apple because it just works” person can figure out.
Now for the bezels, mind that an equidistant circle (or squircle) radius converges to zero. So to avoid having a large inner radius, avoid a large outer radius. The Macbook is not a tablet, you do not hold its corners in your hand.
However, at some point Apple must have decided that the squircle is its entire visual identity and that hard corners on the XY plane are bad. That creates design problems it would not otherwise have.
The fact that developers are led into the trap of not pixel matching to the display however just shows a lack of attention to detail.
They are on my M4 MBA. They're software-rounded rather than in the hardware. You can move the pointer over the lower rounded corners; you can't over the upper ones.
Also, it's worth noting that notches are a hardware-specific. I haven't tried any of the MBAs with notches, but the MBPs have good-enough black levels that the notch just kind of vanishes into the black background when using full-screen apps.
You have to hoop jump with janky tools[1] that actually let you see and access the icons silently hidden because they overshot the notch.
1. Don't have a front-facing camera on your laptop. Your actual laptop screen can be as close to the edge of the laptop case as technology will allow, with no bevel.
2. Have a front-facing camera on your laptop, with no bevel. Your actual laptop screen is now square, but has to be 5mm shorter now. There's a 5mm strip at the top of your laptop that can't be used for anything.
3. Have a front-facing camera on your laptop, with a bevel. Now the actual laptop screen has a "dead space" in middle at the top, but can again be as close to the edge of the laptop case as technology will allow. There's a narrow strip at the top that can't be used for anything, but the area to the left and right of the bevel can.
(A number 4 would be to somehow have a front-facing camera that operates without needing to displace screen area. Not clear how this would work without some complicated mechanism to extend the camera out the top of the screen, which would come with its own problems.)
Now, the vast majority of the time, you're going to be using your Mac in a windowed environment, with menus on the left, indicators on the right, and absolutely nothing in the middle.
In the case of #2, this menu bar has to take real estate from the top of your shorter screen, meaning that your windows are all 5mm shorter. #3 allows the menu bar and indicators to take up that space which on #2 is completely dead, freeing up extra space for your actual applications.
And the key thing is this: For modern full-screen games, in #3, you (apparently) can't use the areas to the side of the bezel; but this is the same situation you're in in #2.
IOW, as another commenter has said: The bevel design doesn't take away screen in the middle; it adds screen space on the side of the bevel.
That said, the API here seems obviously mad: What's the point of giving you a resolution if it's going to silently resize it behind your back? It should either give you the resolution which it won't resize, or throw an error when you try to make one higher.
> There's a 5mm strip at the top of your laptop that can't be used for anything.
Well, it can - on mine I have a physical switch that allows me to block the lens, and it saved me a few times. (I just wish I had a similar one for the microphone.)
I don't know, Lenovo figured it out, and it's no more ridiculous than Apple's solution. Their notch just goes the other way. It's actually a little bit better, because it gives me a space to put my thumb when I'm opening the laptop to, you know, use it.
Sometimes it seems to me like Apple engineers do not use Apple products, because if they did, there's no way we'd have problems like disappearing icons without a way to get them back (Hell, Windows has had this ability for DECADES, why can't Apple "invent" this technology?). We wouldn't have edge-to-edge glass screens which seem to exist solely to get fingerprints on the screen. We wouldn't have closed lids touching the keyboard, leaving weird patterns on the smudgy glass.
The only other option is that design at Apple is not driven by designers or engineers, but by executives who have no clue. And that's worse.
When you look at the remaining bezel along with the camera unit, the lens is the same size. They really could have built a bezelless mac more or less if they only stretched out the components in that camera unit.
These software rounded corners disappeared in software when CRTs gave way to flat panels, but they are indisputably part of the Apple design aesthetic.
IMO the notch is pointless, but they need space for the front camera. With OLED they can just turn the pixels off when it suits the application and it becomes like a big bevel, which was the alternative anyway.
Bezel not bevel FYI.
Apple chose not to have hinting so as to make the text more dimensionally accurate. That did look blurry ... so Apple then doubled the screen resolution.
obligatory: https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
I feel like the only one that's still amazed by tech sometimes. I still look at planes and feel amazed we puny humans did that. It's never good enough.
Guess it's just a matter of taste. I'm never bothered by it.
I have no idea why people praise these laptops, for a cpu I guess. Their design is a joke and feels like a Playskool laptop toy.
At least when the old Apple forced “phablets” as the standard phone size they included a software work around for reaching the top of the screen.
Not adding a dropdown menu for the toolbar is brain dead.
https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar
I think there's a native solution (finally) coming in the next MacOS.
It's a valid complaint, don't get me wrong... but insisting on not fixing it as some sort of moral stance is only hurting yourself.
People are weird, man.
I can do a lot of things instead of write that comment. And installing work arounds for a trillion dollar company with an attitude problem is not one of them. Give attitude, get attitude.
What’s weird is being a complacent drone even though you understand the issue.