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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Go back to when the iPhone introduced the notch. There were so many comments just like yours but when was the last time you heard anyone say anything about it? It gets a lot of attention because it's quite visible — literally right in front of your eyes — but it's also in an area which is dead space most of the time and the most common scenario where it isn't is full screen video conferencing, when you'll be glad for the better quality.

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> but when was the last time you heard anyone say anything about it?

Literally during the latest iPhone announcement where Apple was even timid about showing off the front of the display or talking about the smaller notch, as everyone mocked how dated the notch looked.

Was it really “everyone”, or just a few very online people in your social media? The sold out pre-orders suggest this was not as universal as you're portraying it — for example, looking at I see a note that it was smaller and you have to go 4 pages in before there's a single comment complaining about it, and that's in a community which loves to critique Apple designs!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/apple-makes-the-ipho...

Again, not saying this is nothing or that I love it, only that the buying public does not seem to feel anywhere near as strongly about it and I've never heard anyone complaining about it on a regular basis. Most people get used to it, if they're curious they probably understand that it's for the camera, and get on with life. I'd be quite surprised if this did not follow a very similar trajectory — especially since the display is larger so you could black out the entire top of the screen in software and still have more screen real estate than the previous model.

People buying a device doesn't mean they liked literally every aspect of the device and have no complaints about any aspect of it.

No, but it definitely means that it's not the big deal which overheated rhetoric in forums often implies. Experienced users are often extremely reactionary and wildly overstate the impact of highly visible changes but in most cases if you actually survey their usage later they've almost always gotten used to it.

In this case, the 16" screen gained ~0.2" diagonally and 314px extra resolution. Those extra pixels mean that even with the notch you're going to see more on the screen than you could before and in my experience that's far more likely to be the part which shapes people's impression of a new device.

I like the notch. It makes the phone look different to every other glass slab on the market.

> People buying a device doesn't mean they liked literally every aspect of the device and have no complaints about any aspect of it.

10 people complaining online doesn’t mean that all the millions of purchasers dislike it too.

Why are you moving the goal posts? At first you asked whether "anyone" talked about it, the parent gave you a reasonable answer, and now you're talking about "everyone." Accept that some people do talk about the notch, however small the minority opinion is.

What I should have said is anyone talking about it unprompted — there’s always someone talking about any design decision but you see the average priorities based on when people talk about them unprompted. People complain about the Touch Bar or the old keyboards a lot, or the sided charging / performance issues, but the notch seems much rarer to hear unprompted complaints about.

That doesn’t mean it’s zero but it suggests that the compromise was actually quite reasonable, even if there are a small number of people who vocally disagree.

have you noticed how screenshots and background images for iphones marketing material is chosen so that the notch is almost/totally invisible? it borders on false advertising. it's a design company, they know the most how ugly it is.

Do you have some examples? Looking at https://www.apple.com/iphone/ the notch is emphasized on the icons at the top of the page and the only images where it’s not clearly visible are the ones showing the camera on the back of the phone.

I think the notch works ok on the iPhone as iOS is specifically designed with it in mind. The small spots abreast of the notch are fine for battery meter, clock, and reception bars.

The Mac notch is right in the middle of the toolbar. I have lots of applications that use that space for menus and will be curious how cumbersome it will be now that we need to literally navigate around it.

Will we need to move the mouse down to get around the notch, or will the cursor be allowed to go under the notch?

In the screenshots shown, most of the apps do not have menubars which extend to that space at that display resolution — this could definitely be more of an issue for people who increase the size for accessibility reasons.

From the full-screen screenshots, it appears that it's simply black across the top of the screen unless the application has been designed to support it. That looked like the regular Safari developer tools with an unbroken bar slightly lower down in the video.

My thought is that it’s a pro laptop. Does it really need a built-in webcam? How many people never use them or even tape over them? I could live without it, and if it’s actively providing a detriment, that’s all the more reason to get rid of it.

You mean like (I'm guessing but I think it's a safe guess) the vast majority of "pro" users who videoconference? The opinion that a laptop maker should take out a webcam in 2021 is... interesting.

I never ever used webcam in my life and I'd gladly replaced it with proper display.

Yes, they should make a camless model just for you.

Agreed. In fact, I think I'll mind it less. On my iPhone the only time it looks funny is in landscape, otherwise it just sits in the top-bar. On a laptop that isn't an issue.

I think for me it'll fade away, especially with a dark-mode UI.

> On my iPhone the only time it looks funny is in landscape,

Laptops are effectively always in landscape.

But the notch on the MacBook Pros is on top, not on the left.

When I use it in portrait, it’s on the side.

And yes, sarcasm.

There are literally still so many comments just like that and plenty of people who simply won't buy a phone that has a notch. The comments never stopped.

The screenshots showing application menus almost hitting the notch are ugly af. I'm sure that there are applications that have even more menus than Photoshop or Premiere.

> There are literally still so many comments just like that and plenty of people who simply won't buy a phone that has a notch. The comments never stopped.

… and yet, sales have continued to be extremely high, which suggests that is a self-selected group of extremely vocal opponents rather than a real market trend.

...as if the notch is the only deciding factor.

I hate the notch, but I'll still buy iPhones all day long if my only other choice is to buy products with questionable privacy from an advertising company versus dealing with Apple's shitty designs.

That's their point, it's literally self selection: people who do not care about the notch are not going to write comments about it, and people who care are never going to shut up about it, giving an extremely poor window for understanding how much it actually matters or how it impacts real use. That complaints like this are self-selective is both well known and the OP's entire point; it's amazing how much effort all the replies seem to be going through to not understand this.

Notches on cell phones are so 2018. Apple is really behind in that area.

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