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!
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.
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.
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.
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.