The new Dell XPS's managed to squeeze their camera/mic up above without needing a notch[0]. I'm guessing Apple had the ability to do so too but decided not to either because a.) they're planning on adding FaceID at some point in new models and/or b.) because they're trying to "unify" the design aestethics on macOS and iOS
Dell XPS webcams are generally really inferior to MacBook Pro webcams. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgFd_w2n1es&t=193s shows a good comparison between the M1 MacBook Pro from last year and the 13" Dell XPS. The difference is night and day, even though the M1 MacBook Pro has a 720p resolution. I imagine the difference is similar with the larger 1080p webcam on the new MacBook Pros that, as mentioned in the announcement, has a larger aperture to let in more light and a larger image sensor.
Very easy to squeeze a shitty camera wherever you feel like it. Maybe Dell should move the FN key to the left of the CTRL key instead so their keyboard was tenable.
I'm not who you are replying to, but as someone with a condition that leads to dry, cracked skin on my fingertips, it's not that I can't use a keyboard, it's that fingerprint scanning doesn't work for me. Thankfully it's not the only way to unlock a MBP.
This is going to sound awfully like shilling. But I’m a large fan of the “unlock with Apple Watch” feature of the Mac; and I’ve tried to reverse engineer it for Linux.
I'd take a touch sensor on the back of the phone like is common on android devices over face id any day of the week, by the time the phone is level with your face it's already opened.
I have, but I think I unlock my device at home/work/maskless 99 times for each 1 time I need to do it with a mask. And 99 times I do that, I am generally in a place where I can just pull down my mask safely for 1s. That last 1 time I am OK to use the PIN.
I've never heard a rumor of anything approaching "Apple plans to get rid of Face ID". I don't see how it's possible, at least until fingerprint readers under the screen are 100% reliable, and even then. The only time I've seen people complaining about Face ID is when wearing masks (though pairing it with an Apple Watch fixes that).
I don't see Face ID ever fully going away, even if Touch ID returns as an option. The depth-sensing camera is used for other purposes, too, like Animojis.
pure speculation, but I reckon this is due to security concerns. the camera on a laptop is off by default, including when the laptop opens. i for one have always been a little concerned that most phones (android and ios) don't have a "camera on" indicator.
Of course it's not a bad decision. It's idiotic decision. They literally added something to spoil what was needed. They could just fix their previous idiocy but no .. they had to add another one.
Even the fact of it presence is annoying enough to avoid buying such model.
It is "uuugly" (with S.Jobs intonation) and that should be enough.
It's also invitation for more SW bugs and unnecessary complications. My Menubar is set to autohide and even that is not working properly because some windows from time to time stuck in a mode when they fail to extend themselves to occupy space where MenuBar was. They stuck in size FullScreenSize.Height-MenuBar.Height and you cannot change it unless you reboot the machine. It's obviously a bug. They cannot fix it for many OS versions already. Imagine adding to this bug another complication with notch ... Goodness.
Let's not forget that other idiots are going to copy it everywhere without too much thinking too.
"Ugly" argument should be enough. But there are more: How about mouse pointer. Should it be stuck once you reach this notch or it should pass through? Both ways it is idiotic. How about full screenshot - it will be with notch now? How about those apps that would fail to hide it? I am pretty sure you'll stuck with this status bar spoiling the whole picture here and there. How about multiple screens and complications with moving windows from one screen to another with keeping their size or complications with screeenshots when multiple screens are connected? What if you have a lot of menu items in your app? Some of them will be after the notch?
And all of this for what? To solve something that was already solved long time ago by "autohiding" MenuBar?
For my taste adding this absolutely useless "notch" is really idiotic decision . The very presence of this ugly notch is spoiling the feeling.
Even knowing that this device was made by people who find this idiotic notch aesthetically pleasing spoils everything because you know it's not the first idiocy and not the last idiocy you'll find there when you dig deeper. At least this is my expectation now. I was correct about ports, I was correct about keyboard, I was correct about idiocy of touch bar, lack of magsafe and I think I am not mistaken here too. They could've ask me, would save them a lot of redundant efforts in production. I use laptop to it's maximum and described my usage in details somewhere in comments. I really use laptop as laptop and I use each and every feature of it.
If somebody wrote a plugin that simply moved the menubar (and the maximum top of fullscreen apps) $height_of_notch pixels lower and drew nothing but black above it, would you be happy? Because that would give you parity with existing macbooks.
Looking at the videos, that appears to be exactly what they did. That makes total sense for not breaking existing apps but now I'm curious whether developers can opt-in to use the space around the notch in full screen mode.
If you’re curious, this just posted: the result full screen mode renders below the notch (which is still more pixels than the previous models) and developers can customize it to render in the rectangles they call auxiliary spaces.
There is a generous bezel remaining below the screen. They could simply shift the display downward and have the same size display in the exact same footprint without the notch. It's a purely aesthetic choice.
I think it's really funny how they undid every single complaint this crowd had, and rather than focusing on that, people are complaining about the notch.
How unnecessarily dramatic. They fixed so many things, on the balance this seems like a good deal for those of us that use MBPs. Implying that you’d reject all those changes over the notch seems quite silly to me.
Personally I think everyone will forget the notch in a few weeks. We got over it for phones, which have much less screen real estate to spare. If the extra space enables a permanently visible status bar in OSX, even when full screen with apps, then I personally will be thrilled with this change.
It's a plain analogy, any drama would be created by the reader's reaction.
People also stop complaining simply because they've complained enough. It's definitely not always the case that they "get over it". People that need a Mac will certainly rationalize since they have no choice.
But given a choice, people would absolutely not buy a laptop with a turd like this notch front and center.
Assuming you’re willing to buy a MBP personally, skipping it over the notch seems inexplicable to me. In every other way this seems like the best MBP delivered in a literal decade, assuming they didn’t mess up the keyboard. Much faster processor, faster display, better keyboard, better peripherals, and finally removing the 16GB memory cap. They even maintained compatibility for people like me who prefer single cable docks.
Of course if price is the reason, then that makes more sense. Apple seems to be returning to a wider (and more reasonable imho) price and performance gap between the pro and the air. If I was in the market for a laptop, and I’m not because I think laptops are silly in general[0], I’d go for an air. The pro is very much in the “work will buy one for me” price, and it offers performance I don’t really need out of a personal machine.
0 - As I’ve said before, laptops generally compromise too much for my tastes. Like many others I work entirely from a desk, so my personal mac is and always will be a mini. But since work will inevitably give me one of these, I’m thrilled that they’ve made it so much better, even if I wouldn’t buy one myself.
I wanted to get one personally cause I'm still on a 2014 but the design puts me off. It looks like one of those old school 2008 models. The notch is just ugly.
I'd get one but I need it to look premium if I'm dropping 4k and right now it looks like it's from 2008
It’s your money, but this mode of thinking is utterly alien to me.
The point of the MBP is that it’s for professionals. It’s a tool, not a fashion statement. The idea that it’s not worth the money because it looks outdated is utterly baffling to me; it’s worth the money because they’ve stuffed it full of the most performant components apple has ever put into a laptop ever. I want it to be a function over form machine, and worrying about its looks as part of the buying decision genuinely never crossed my mind.
If you want a fashion statement laptop and don’t need the performance, then don’t get a MBP. Again, your money; I don’t get it, but you do you. But the issue here isn’t that the laptop is bad per se, the issue is that that laptop wasn’t made for your use case.
Pffft, as if Apple didn't market every. single. one. of their products as a fashion statement.
Apple clearly has always chosen form over function and being different over function. That's the only reason why the ridiculously useless Dock exists at all - marketing loved it since it embodies both of those traits.
> Pffft, as if Apple didn't market every. single. one. of their products as a fashion statement.
Nonsense. The Mac Pro is clearly marketed as a professional took for professional use, always has been. Ditto with their high end displays. I don’t even think they had these objects in the last Apple Store I went into, actually.
Furthermore, every single ad I’ve ever seen for the MBP has been about artists, creatives, and programmers using it to make things. They have always presented it as the professional’s tool for creating stuff, even if at times that’s been a bit of a farce.
Now compare how they presented the MacBook, a laptop that they sold in gold color. That is a laptop they presented as a fashion choice, and interestingly it’s also the laptop they abandoned first.
> Apple clearly has always chosen form over function and being different over function
It’s only “always” been this way if you’re relatively young. In fact Apple’s turn towards form over function sometime after Job’s death caused quite a bit of angst here, both in terms of their hardware and software design. I’m old enough to remember when the MBP was unquestionably the best laptop a developer could buy, and I was very sad to watch it slowly lose ground to other laptops as Apple pursued thinness over user experience, hardware specs, upgradability, or durability.
If anything else, what I’m seeing today seems like a return to Apple from earlier in my career, when they made professional grade laptops that lead the pack. There are still some changes I’d love to see, such as more upgrade ability, but an Apple that’s willing to make its devices thicker if it improves user experience is very much a “function over form” move.
I have a suspicion that most vocal notch haters are not even users of Apple products. Notch on iPhone? It is in the status bar anyway, so mostly does not matter. Notch on a mac? Same.
Right now I have just an empty space in the center of the menu bar. I could not care less if notch takes a bit of that space.
I mean I have a 2019 MBP and right now the space next to the camera module is black bezel. What possible harm could be done buy adding pixels to those areas?
But of what use are they? It saves you like a dozen or so pixels when apps aren't in full screen, and they don't do anything in full screen mode. Wouldn't hiding the menu bar save the same amount of pixels without the notch?
I personally find notches to be very distracting visually, and I just don't like them from a design standpoint.
I think Apple recognizes this even. Looking at their marketing material. You have to scroll pretty far down to ever be shown the notch, as it seems they're intentionally hiding it with apps in full screen mode.
The notch issue can probably be fixed though just by turning it off and that area will just be black space. I hate the notch too so I'll probably just do that.
I would prefer something like the Dell XPS laptops, very minimal bezel with a camera and screen that still looks edge to edge. I'm talking about the new XPS ones, not the old ones with the camera at the bottom of the screen.
The XPS has a 720p camera and people complain on forums it has terrible picture quality. It also has thicker bezels than these new macbooks.
I think apple made the right trade-off. Thin bezels and a good camera at the top of the display. Sadly you cannot have both in a laptop without a notched design.
That approach leads to a webcam that's garbage. Apple chose the notch approach to allow thin bezels on most of the screen while still having a 1080p webcam with good low light performance.
Hardware performance and design don't seem to be the same here though - XPS could have gone with a better camera in their smaller bezel and GP's point still stands.
It's unlikely the reason for that on the dell is the design of the bezel, most likely they just cheaped out or got a discount on several year-old parts.
Sure, but when people say ie, Dell does this better - every time I go look at the Acer or Dell product - they haven't actually focused on what users want.
My guess - looking good on a zoom call for your work or your soririty or your dating videos is going to matter a TON more to folks than whether or not something is integrated into a fat bezel, or is in a notch.
This debate has already occured BTW with the phones, and despite various claims that the notch would destroy iphone sales it did not.
That said, I build my own PCs (talk about driver issues long term) and do purchasing of Lenovo and Dell for business (and a dell "server" costs a mint even though what is inside is also not THAT amazing) and don't use a mac personally, but my family does, and so I'm not totally blind to the value offering they have.
I have to think Dell and others could have put in a notch if they wanted to make that compromise. They clearly felt it better to either do it right (and find a way to nestle the camera stuff into the bezel) than to go full notch.
tl;dr: a thicker bottom bezel allows the necessary space for a better keyboard layout without shrinking the touchpad, and makes the laptop more usable when your eyes are at heights closer to that of the screen rather than looking down on it from above
Because I have poor eyesight but I like to keep a lot of text on my screen, I often work partially or fully reclined with my laptop lying on my chest or my stomach. When I do this, the height of my fingers as they rest on the keyboard tends to obscure the bottom part of the screen on 'modern' laptops with super-thin bezels all around, so I have to reduce the height of my full-screen terminal.
On older laptops, where the bottom bezel may be a full inch or more tall, I don't need this. Additionally, I prefer a full, standard, IBM style keyboard layout: a dedicated row of F keys, spaced out in the standard way, and with full-sized arrow keys. One problem with such keyboards is that they compromise the size of the trackpad, because of th space they take up on the bottom of the laptop. On keyboards without trackpoints, or with designs centered on large, excellent trackpads like MacBooks, this cannot work well.
So for me, an ideal hardware setup for input on a laptop might well be something like a MBP, but with a 3:2 display and a bottom bezel 1-2 inches tall, which would allow for a full-size keyboard alongside a spacious, Mac-like trackpad.
Apple fits a camera, a lidar, and god knows what other sensors on the front of a phone in a notch that's three times thinner than the one on its own laptops.
So yeah. They could have a thin bezel. They deliberately chose not to, even if it eats into the precious little space of the top menu bar.
It looks like the iPhone is about 2-3 times thicker than a MacBook lid. I'm not sure they actually have the space to put iPhone equivalent hardware above the MacBook screen.
What content are you consuming? Because if you remove the screen area next to the notch, it's 16:10, and if you're watching videos, you're probably doing it at 16:9, and games at 16:9 or 16:10.
I would rather take a bezel and reduce the amount of e-waste this custom garbage has on the world. Add to that this will most likely make screen replacements significantly harder and more expensive.
For me, notches are just ugly. The main purchasing decisions behind my current phone is its lack of notch. I hate the feeling of something interrupting my screen.
Is it though? I was able to replace a broken Macbook screen a couple of generations ago. It was hard and took a while, but I managed. I'm very sure I would not be able to do this given this kind of screen.
I guess we'll see when the first tear-down comes out. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the only way to fix the screen is to replace it together with the webcam.
I'm pretty sure there hasn't been any "3rd-party screens" for macbooks since Retina displays came along. It's all sold as the display + case, lcd bonded to the glass.
Yeah I wonder how this will be resolved. The screenshots of Photoshop on the Apple store page show a menu that runs quite close to the notch. Will menu items be truncated or pop up randomly on the other side? How will it work for less terse languages like German?
I routinely don't have enough space there. Any professional app (and these laptops are squarely aimed at professionals) will eat into this "unused gray space".
Add a few apps that add ions to the menu bar, and suddenly you already have no space even without the notch.
Switching to fullscreen keeps everything below the notch, judging from the screenshots. I'm betting they'll add an accessibility option to keep the UI below the notch as well.
