A 'like" is worth 1 point, but an “anger” is worth 5 points.
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So, in the follow up video it was demonstrated that app menus do flow properly around the notch when in applications, and the mouse pointer is even aware of the notch. This same consideration doesn’t apply to menu status items which will happily flow under the notch – even Apple’s own menu status items can be placed there so it’s not unique to the 3rd party tool shown in the first video. It also doesn’t apply when you’re in Finder which will also allow you to move the mouse under the notch.
It’s all stupid and unnecessary – a physical manifestation of The Complicator’s Gloves. Or, as you say, “CD players in trunks.” (Although in defense of the trunk-mounted CD changer design, it was really designed so you load up the caddy with CDs and basically forget it – not that you’d go changing it all the time.)
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I always love seeing TDWTF references in the wild.
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The Touch Bar itself, I don’t really care about. Seems a bit gimmicky to me, but I can imagine some people may find it genuinely useful. What drives me up the wall is that they sacrificed the Escape key for it. I understand it’s been restored in recent models, but work hasn’t given me one of those.
It may be more screen, but it’s also a different shape. Developers who previously could safely rely on the screen being a rectangle now have to allow for the possibility that it may instead be an irregular concave octagon.
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i’m using the menu bar right now 
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At the risk of derailing the thread, putting the CD changer in the trunk was also the bog standard way to do it. Every car did that through most of the CD era, because CD changers were too large to put behind the dash. I appreciate the analogy being attempted here, but it’s a perfectly reasonable design, given the constraints of the time and the media.
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I would argue that that might be the case on a Windows machine with a notch, but if the menu bar is the entire height of the notch, it’s really just Apple’s job to make sure that what ends up in there (which is largely driven by system APIs and not devs manually sticking things up there pixel by pixel) actually plays nicely with it. Even in full-screen mode, it looks like the menu bar just recedes upward to create a blank space, instead of letting the app extend into that area at all.
Clearly, Apple needs to have someone actually dust off the menu bar icon handling code and start doing something with it, because that specifically seems to be where the problem lies.
Honestly I had no idea that was the case. It was the first time I’d known someone who owned a car with one and I haven’t seen one since, heh.
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I don’t think macOS is really a priority for Apple anymore. I suspect it’s only got a few years before it ends up sandboxed into an app in the iOS walled garden, whatever hardware you’re running.
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. You should have bought an iPad Pro.”
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I wonder how much of this is for marketing. Adding a semi-usable stripe of screen to the left and right of the camera helps Apple call the MBP a 16" laptop instead of a 15" one, even though the hack is largely unusable.
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Early adopters dilemma.
In the long run, this stuff will get worked out relatively quickly. The real issue, which I think gets lost in translation in comment sections on this issue (here included) is exactly the question in the tweet: why did this get shipped in this condition? That’s what’s embarrassing.
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wHEn YOU sPeNd eXTra foR APPLE pRODuctS, yOu’re paYinG FOR quAlIty COntRol AND deSIGn exPERTise.
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I never found the Touch Bar bad per se (although I agree that the lack of a physical escape button was a stupid decision and I’m glad they fixed it later).
To me, part of the problem with the Touch Bar is it was basically impossible to build up any muscle memory around it – you’d have a featureless slab that would require looking down at the keyboard any time you wanted to use its functions. (And given its dynamic nature, things are always moving around to different places depending on various contextual factors.)
About the only time I ever found much use for it was a couple of very specific use cases like quickly scrubbing through video or audio. It doesn’t seem like much software ever took advantage of it either which basically spelled doom for it since I can’t imagine it was cheap or easy to produce.
1 Like
As described on the German Apple site.
16,2" Liquid Retina XDR Display (41,05 cm Diagonale)1, 3456 x 2234 native
Auflösung bei 254 ppi
14,2" Liquid Retina XDR Display (35,97 cm Diagonale)1, 3024 x 1964 native
Auflösung bei 254 ppi
That extra fifth of an inch is made possible by the notch. Woo hoo!
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I’m gonna add that I detest diagonal screen measurements. A 16" wide, one pixel tall screen is technically a 16" screen when measured diagonally.
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… reminds me of the wide tv obsession when they first arrived: “I don’t care if the people are all short and fat, I damn well want to see picture on ALL of this new wide screen”
It’s like: “How dare they present me with ANY portion of the inside of my laptop’s lid (or phone’s front side) and not make it full of pixels? HOW DARE THEY!”
Fuckwits, all.
ETA and this - this, this, THIS.
Who actually asked for cameras IN the screen? Nobody. Who likes them? Only the people who insist a bezel is a sin and all facing real-estate MUST be pixellated.
And how DO you easily obscure the camera, physically, now? Is it obvious where it is? Is its position within the notch known AND consistent from model to model?
6 Likes
Isn’t this notch hack going to be highly useable to anyone with a void in the center of their menu bar? Isn’t that pretty common?
Anyway, what about the rounded corners? Stupid? Cool? Purely aesthetic or are there functional considerations? Too much of a burden on developers?
And for your consideration, can we all agree that Apple should be handling overflow of menu bar status items (the RHS things) better? What presumably we can't agree on would be the relative importance of the notch (which will exacerbate the RHS overflow issue) vs the pre-existing overflow issue and the absolute importance of the "lots of status items" scenario.
I seem to recall at least one model being able to mount under the passenger seat, but I never had anything other than a single disc model in the three vehicles that had that ability. (and currently, I just play music over my phone’s bluetooth connection to the stereo in the truck, or to a cheesy battery powered BT speaker on the recently acquired car that can’t do BT and has no aux cable.
Maybe for simple apps, but many of my apps combined with menu bar item icons cover the entire menu bar on my 15" mac.
I dislike rounded corners when they adversely affect usability - so they can be ok in some UI but they have no place on hardware screens. Same goes for the stupid rounded edges on many “premium” cell phones, which make it hard to put the phones in to use able fully protective cases and distorts full screen images and the UI at the edges.
