Live data from Hacker News

Remove the Notch

topnotch.app

61–70 of 88 posts

Re: Remove the Notch

#61
post #19
post #15

I hoped this would be a campaign to stop the notch insanity on phones. Give us the full screen back! (I have a OnePlus 7 Pro -- I bought it precisely because it doesn't have that nonsense.)

If your phone had a front-facing camera, you never had the use of the full front area. (Unless it was one of the weird ones with a pop-up camera!) A notch lets you use those odd-shaped blank spaces at the top of your phone for junk like a clock, and gives you more space for apps.

I've had phones with pop-out, hole punch, notch, and full bar cameras, even one without any front facing camera at all. Hole punch struck the best balance IMO as it allows simple design, a decent camera, and takes up a small enough amount of space that it's not really jarring to just fullscreen content like it isn't there at all.

For the new MacBooks I'm happy they at least did something other than full bar but I don't think the solution is the be all end all.

For wishful thinking quality behind screen cameras would be the ultimate win in my book if anyone can pull it off properly without limiting other things too much.

Re: Remove the Notch

#63
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll remove it in 3-5 years and congratulate themselves for listening to people.

I wish I had that kind of courage.

Objectively they do - they rolled back years of minimalist design on the new MBP: thicker body, more ports, HDMI, card reader, etc.

Re: Remove the Notch

#64
post #59

It's really interesting that the notch was basically only an option on a Mac laptop. It doesn't work at all with Windows or KDE. It almost works on Gnome. But with macOS, the menu bar has been there since the very beginning, and the center of the bar has been increasingly empty as resolutions increased. A fortunate coincidence. The notch is here to stay, until good cameras get a lot smaller. It just makes a ton of se…

Gnome Phosh has gained an option to cope with screen notches by shifting the top bar clock away from the cutout area, so that it remains visible. Presumably, Gnome-Shell will be doing the same on these devices.

Re: Remove the Notch

#65

i'd have much rather that apple remove the camera entirely to support a nearly bezel-less, notchless screen. then for folks who want a camera, apple could have added a smart connector and magnets near the top back of the lid to clip on a camera when needed. it would have been a real win for privacy[0], and they can do their little trick of excessively marking up accessories to boost revenue. it's even better than a p…

What percentage of laptops do you think are sold without a webcam? Maybe 0.01%? Probably less.

Re: Remove the Notch

#67

There's just no pleasing people. "Here's more screen real estate, but it's not contiguous." "No! I hate you! This is an abomination! I will black it out and make it useless." If they hadn't made any camera updates people would also be ticked about that. Edit: I thought people were using this to push their menubar down below the level of the notch and creating black dead zones on the left and right of the notch. But I…

I think "there's just no pleasing people" comes off as really harsh, here. Some people prefer the extra real estate (for wallpaper), others might find the non-uniformity of the notch awkward or visually distracting. It's just a preference.

...or to put it another way, indeed, there's no pleasing people, because "people" is not a homogenous unit but instead hundreds of millions of individuals. This is why customizable software - or even open-source software - is such a boon. Let people compute how they choose.

(OTOH: offer lots of knobs and people will complain that it's hard to understand, that time would be better spent making one version work well instead of a million combinations. Open-source it and there'll be whining about fragmentation, devs not fixing the right things, and on and on. Maybe there really is no pleasing people.)

Re: Remove the Notch

#68
post #31
post #3

But does it exclude the bar from being populated _under_ the notch? I feel like that is a greater sin.

For reference, this is how the notch works with menus and status bar items. https://twitter.com/SnazzyQ/status/1453143798251339778

Yep! That was the set of tweets I was referencing. It allows items behind the notch, and it's not just iStats.

Re: Remove the Notch

#69
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just that Apple will have you think that nobody has ever developed a laptop screen with a smaller bezel, and thus the revolutionary and innovative approach is to just obstruct the display. The macbook has basically gone from having a comically huge bezel to something people will consider a nuisance. Dell did similar with the XPS 13 when they put the camera lens on the bottom corner of the screen, and it wasn't t…

That’s true, but the XPS 13 camera and angle is terrible and that’s certainly not preferable for me in the age of Zoom.

XPS 13 camera has been back on the top for a while already.
Post reply on HN