That’s quite a beautiful menu bar. Is that a regular DPI 4K? Do you ever use this on smaller screens? Gotta pretty tight fit there.
I agree that a better notch introduction they should have tightened up the overflow situation on the menubar. I’m guessing that that CorelCAD 2019 menubar has some issues on lower sized and lower (effective) resolution screens already. I’m a big fan of apple’s DPI system (I worked on Window’s DPI so, I guess it’s one of those don’t learn how sausage is made things) and I enjoy using my status bar add-on to quickly go lower res for tired eyes or otherwise more relaxed sessions (which probably wouldn’t involve CorelCAD but anyway…)
Apple has been sued for overstating screen sizes before (something like calling an 11.9" screen a 12" screen), so I doubt they’d go out of their way to invite a lawsuit again.
I do wonder how much usable space you can remove from a screen and still advertise it by it’s diagonal measurement, though, since the diagonal is still technically true.
Yeah - I’m gonna go with stupid. The new Surface Laptop Studio has this also. I think it’s an outrageously stupid and useless aesthetic change to make. Obviously I have a (possibly) irrational hatred of this. I generally despise form over function. Not to say aesthetics aren’t important, just that all too often with Apple products aesthetics seem to compromise sensible design. Jony Ive was infamous for this and I’m glad to see this trend reversing after his departure, but with the stupid notch and stupid rounded corners in the new MBP it seems like some of his taint remains.
I’d say in most every developer scenario nobody will need to know/care about this when writing their code. There’s only a few px lost in every corner and the display will still project its “real” unmasked resolution. The only time I could think of it mattering is if you have a super customized UX that draws precise graphics to the very edge of the display and losing a tiny bit of information in the corners could somehow compromise the design or functionality.
iPhones have been doing this for years since rounded corners were introduced in the iPhone X. Funnily enough if you take a screenshot on an iPhone X or newer with an edge to edge screen design, the outer corners are still rendered in the screenshot even though there’s nothing physically present in the hardware to display them.
There is no screen where the notch is, hence the reason for the notch in the first place. The camera is still just embedded in a black space behind the glass, and I can’t imagine it being any less visible than the cameras that are already embedded in the black frame of the display bezel on older laptops (in order to make it less visible, Apple would have to put something on the glass, which would of course damage the image quality of the new cameras they just spent 10 minutes hyping up in their press event). If you want/need to block the camera, do it the same way you always have.
(I should also note that for several years now, Apple has been building the camera mechanism in such a way that the indicator light is physically associated with the sensor activation, so one cannot be on without the other anymore. And as of Monterey there’s now an indicator within the menu bar for when the microphone is active as well, as there has been within the right-hand side of the iOS “menu bar” area.)
This seems reasonable at first glance but it immediately fails the Fitts Law heuristic. One of the reason the menus are at the top of the page is that it effectively makes the Y dimension of the click target infinite. If the menus are not at the top of the screen then you’ll overshoot. A lot.
An alternative would be to reduce the size of the desktop for non-notch-ready applications, but then why have a notch at all? Unless the OS has complete smart management of drawing the menus around the notch, it doesn’t really work.
Because then it would be a user choice, and people who have undemanding apps, or ones modified to use the notch could use the default setting. And people with older apps or who need a full menu bar could use the reduced screen/desktop setting and change to the notch whenever, if ever, they are ready. But apple like to tell users what they have to like and call that an improvement, like telling people they are holding their iPhone wrong rather than admitting their antenna design was flawed.
Right? If the point is to hide the camera by putting it in the notch painting a giant bullseye on it really isn’t the way to go about it.
I mean, technically it does as demonstrated in one of the follow up tweets – the OS is able to occlude the mouse pointer from the notch area in an application (but strangely enough not Finder).
Or, I guess it could just do this:
(Or better yet not have this stupid design to begin with…)
So, historically, what used to happen with these third party menu-mod apps when they added items to the menubar but the menubar needed to be displayed on small-width or vertical monitors? When the user set the display resolution too low? When Accessibility users made the system display screen fonts in a larger size?
My guess is that the OS needs a fix to specifically handle the display of menu items that flow into the notch, but the logic of how it will do so is already coded in the OS: it just needs a hardware-specific trigger.
To enable the thin design of Mac notebook computers, the clearance between the display (screen) and the top case is engineered to tight tolerances. If you use a camera cover, palm rest cover, or keyboard cover with your Mac notebook, remove the cover before closing your display. Leaving any material on your display, keyboard, or palm rest might interfere with the display when it’s closed and cause damage to your display.
This is a problem with a third-party app, iStat Menus.
Products frequenty ship before third-party developers are able to account for changes. Asking “how is this shippable?” is missing the point.
In this case Bjango, who I’ve read about frequently in the pages of Boing Boing over the years, are a highly active developer, and I have no doubt they’ll update iStat as soon as they’re able to work nicely with the notch.
While musing on this I stared at the Apple Menu on my friend’s Macbook Pro and had to bring out a ruler to confirm my suspicions.
The Apple logo on the menu bar is placed just so that it’s equidistant (top and left) from the edge of the laptop lid.
Shrinking the bezel even more lets them place the Apple logo closer to the left and equidistant from the top and left edges of the bezel, while keeping the logo equidistant to the laptop lid edges.
Apparently there is a way of dealing with app-menu overflow: get info on the app and click “scale to fit.” This does not appear on notchless Macs–it’s clearly hardware-sensitive.
if you look at the additional video in the vox article above: no it’s not.
the os treats makes finder behaves differently than apps ( finder blocks the mouse from the notch, while apps jump the mouse across the notch. ) things like battery status - which are made by apple - can be dragged under the notch, and are accessible but invisible if you can get the mouse there
it’s all indicative that it’s apple’s problem. one they created and failed to fully solve.
