For the love of god remove the notch, that's the only idiotic branding vestige left.
The notch is bigger than it should be for sure, I would've loved for it to be narrower. But I don't really mind the trade-off it represents.
You could add half an inch of screen bezel and make the machine bigger, just to fit the web cam. Or you could remove half an inch of screen , essentially making the "notch" stretch across the whole top of the laptop. Or you could find some compromised place to put the camera, like those Dell laptops which put the camera near the hinge. Or you can let the screen fill the whole lid of the laptop, with a cut-out for the camera, and design the GUI such that the menu bar fills the part of the screen that's interrupted by the notch.
I personally don't mind that last option. For my needs, it might very well be the best alternative. If I needed a bigger below-the-notch area, I could get the 16" option instead of the 14" option.
OLED screens are inherently transparent, there is just a light-emitting layer in them. You put your camera behind the screen, and either make the few pixels on top of the lens go black when it's on, or you use a lot of software to remove the light that comes from the screen and clean up the picture.
Feels like for a laptop it would be durable enough and also fulfill the "webcam is physically blocked when off".
Maybe it's a patent thing.
I use my webcam enough these days to take part in video meetings that it'd be a pretty big problem for me.
Snapdragon X Elite 2 processor will be out next year for the refreshed model
The weight is the big one for me - only 2.5 lbs vs 3.4 lbs
Remember the Dell has an 18 month old processor, X Elite 2 coming out next year.
Source for all these stats: https://nanoreview.net/en/laptop-compare/dell-xps-13-9345-20...
Companies tried that. You get very strange-looking up-your-nose pictures.