And all those complaints tell you apple is doing it right?
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And most importantly, you can still do USB-C charging. That was my fear they brought back magsafe, but lost universal charging via USB-C.
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This is the mouse with the charging port in the bottom all over again. There is nothing that Apple can do that fanboys won’t ferociously defend them for.
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Yeah, I agree. It’s either a dumb oversight or a dumb way to roll out a new product. I’m just always dismayed at how personally people who can drop $2,000+ on a laptop fresh out of the oven take fairly minor annoyances like this. Like, your work is so precious and bleeding edge you absolutely can’t wait to upgrade for a few months to see what compatibility issues you might have? Spare me. My daily driver MB Air is now 7 years old and the OS is fully up to date. I have to be careful about how many processes I’m running, but still, it’s reliable and I won’t have any compatibility issues until it’s so obsolete that support just fully drops off.
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Yeah, Mrs Peas has a work-issued last-gen MBP and, although I hate the fact that there’s no MagSafe, it’s pretty dope to be able to plug into any port for the same results (though iirc, one port is also Thunderbolt while the others aren’t).
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lmao, I assumed it’d either scroll or have an overflow menu. That’s a laughably obvious issue that should’ve been addressed way before launch.
Just give people the option to “disable” the notch by turning off the screen on either side of it and moving the menu bar below it… Seems like a reasonable option to give as a workaround, but I doubt Apple will ever implement it. Hopefully a third party developer can figure something out, like they did on Android with Nacho Notch.
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Yes, that’s the entire reason for it. Same on the iPhones. Previously the camera was within the bezel, and now they surround that camera space with more display instead of more bezel.
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the (ridiculous) way macos does keyboard shortcuts could have been used for this: an os level system that tracks each legacy app and it’s preferences.
as apps update they pull themselves out of the list, otherwise there’s a simple option to allow users to turn on notch avoidance per app, and maybe some important apps are pretested and default added
or they could have added menu bar scrolling ( ick ), icon area collapse, an option to reduce usable screen size, etc
they had options ( primarily i think, don’t have a notch ) and it definitely seems they released a half realized product
I’m not impressed with the self-satisfaction of the notch haters. I agree 100% with the previous commenter who points out it’s “more screen”.
I’ve literally been waiting for the notch on laptops. The notch, properly thought of, is screen to the left and right of a camera. It gets more useful, the wider the screen, and the Mac menu bar is a perfect place for a notch.
Apple’s not going to hide it. They like it. They’re proud of it. The fact that it’s controversial and causes heat and flames just makes it more effective at branding.
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they could’ve just made a taller screen without the notch, no?
they control the horizontal. they control the vertical.
im actually more curious though:
will it be easier to cover the camera with tape now, or harder?
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They sell these things in different sizes, so, yes?
This will not placate notch-critics, and it won’t do anything to solve app menus from running into the notch from the left, but bartender is a little app that organizes your menubar icons, lets you hide seldom-used ones, and can display them in a bar below the menubar when you do want to see them, so they won’t run into the notch from the right. I’ve been using it for years to declutter my screen.
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Also, this reminds me of the beta for Mac OS X 10.0. Apple put a purely decorative apple icon in the middle of the menubar.
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At bare minimum it should default to putting the menu bar below the notch for apps that don’t explicitly declare notch compatibility.
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That shouldn’t be required. The app passes the menu structure to the os, and there’s where the rectangle coordinates are determined, as well as handling that layer of mouse events.
If the language is Farsi, the os will build the menu columns right-to-left, and the app shouldn’t know or care. The app gets a File Open event, not a mouse click x,y event.
That might be safest if there are too many special cases to account for (test).
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right. so there were lots of notchless – and therefore more user friendly – ways of getting to:
to me it seems a bit like when your favorite food suddenly advertises “50% more” on the package. and you look at the package weight and maybe it’s a few ounces smaller than before, or maybe in some rare cases a few ounces more – but really it’s just the package size that’s 50% more. it’s not real value.
i actually could imagine being with apple on this, if it was cheaper to build this way, and they then passed that savings to the user. it seems more inline with this trend ( source ) however. ever increasing even adjusted for inflation.
[eta]
the problem with @Christobell’s idea is that on macos all apps share the same menu bar space – so as you tab around apps the menu bar would be moving up and down. it would be quite… weird.
the reason i was thinking about a per-app configuration for menus to “auto arrange” around the notch is that so that the end user can figure out which apps it works with themselves rather than rely on apple ( and their test department )
i feel for people who’s apps will never be updated:
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It’s kind of funny/sad.
Apple got so much right with the latest MBP model (even if it was largely undoing years of Jony Ive induced fuckery). Then they completely fuck it all up by adding a stupid notch for the camera into the display rather than make the top bezel slightly larger.
Or, you know, rather than designing a clunky and over-engineered solution to a problem that was entirely self-imposed and unnecessary, they could have just made the bezel slightly taller instead.
I know I use the menu bar a whole hell of a lot more than I use the front facing camera and I’m not really going to care if the top bezel is a few mm taller as a result.
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Now I want to see someone try to remove the camera and stick a little screen up there.
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paging Chuck Tingle…
I may have mentioned it before on this forum given how often Apple design comes up, but I’ve sort of created my own name for this phenomenon. It’s based on a road trip my wife and I took with a friend of ours, who had one of the “new” (like, 2000s-era) VW Beetles. At one point I remarked that it was what you’d get if Apple designed a car. About an hour later, we had to pull over to change CDs because her 5-disc CD player had been installed in the trunk. Despite being an after-market addition, it struck me as still being completely in line with what you’d get if Apple designed a car: well-thought-out dashboard, convenient features, good engine, streamlined, bonuses like heated seats, and one thing that’s completely absurd and nonsensical. The CD player in the trunk. The Magic Mouse charging port, the new MBP notch, removing the headphone jack from the iPhone… it’s all CD players in trunks.
Honestly, I’m kind of stupefied that Apple didn’t take The Notch as an opportunity to Sherlock Bartender. The menu bar’s right-hand side can get out of hand VERY quickly if you don’t have something like Bartender to keep it tidy. Apps are constantly putting their icons in the menu bar for reasons that range from reasonable (service-level stuff like BetterTouchTool that you don’t want to see in the Dock all the time) to completely pointless (Tweetbot/Telegram/Discord/etc. that basically just take you back to the app when you click on them). I’m an iStats user as well, but I have all but the network activity stuff and the compact battery indicator tucked away behind Bartender’s overflow view so it’s not blinking at me constantly and taking up a huge amount of menu bar space. The only reason I can think for why this hasn’t been built into the OS by now is because Apple doesn’t want it to become mechanically associated the mess that is the collapsible Windows System Tray, except it’s already being treated that way by other developers.
I’m reasonably certain that app menus—the stuff that renders from the left-hand side in LTR languages—are cognizant of the notch and will flow around it; the example shown in the video doesn’t provide evidence for or against that case, since Help is clearly visible on the screen the entire time, and by convention Help is the last-most root-level menu item in Mac apps. But as @t3knomanser said earlier, the notch is just a further illustration that Apple hasn’t put any care or attention into the menu icon side of the menu bar in a very long time.
Hilariously, I’m actually more reticent to get one of these new M1 laptops because they removed the Touch Bar. I know that the tech enthusiast community has treated it like the second-worst thing to ever happen to the Mac laptop line (the worst, justifiably, being the disaster that was the butterfly keyboard mechanism), and truthfully the base-level implementation provided by Apple needs a lot more attention that it received since its introduction, but software like BetterTouchTool has let me build extremely powerful, useful Touch Bar strips for apps I use all the time, and they’re especially handy for two things: 1) grouping operations together into a compact space without me needing to remember all of the associated keyboard shortcuts, and 2) giving me a place to put infrequently-used actions that I inevitably forget all about after a brief period because there’s no up-front UI surfacing them. I have a control strip for my RSS reader (Reeder) that has sync, next/previous, mark as read, preview, open in browser, star, etc. all built into a place I can reach with just two fingers without even moving my hand, and it’s graphical so I don’t have to constantly remember the wonky-ass Google Reader-based shortcuts that I never leaned to begin with. I added a custom control to the massive OS-tier replacement preset called AquaTouch that lets me call the “stop iTunes after this song is over” AppleScript I’ve had on my Mac for 15-odd years now and eternally forget is there. The idea of going from a dynamic, flexible, customizable control strip back to a set of static function buttons that I basically never use (and which are now taller, because that was a problem I guess?) is extremely frustrating. I’m hoping that it comes back as a BTO option next year, because I would get one with zero hesitation (I am, sadly, probably not going to get my wish and Apple will just forget it ever happened as soon as they get around to updating the 13" MBP next year, which inexplicably does still have a Touch Bar in the M1 version).
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