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MagyarCheckMag | The M4 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are unlikely to fix Apple's ridiculous notch design
There is no denying that for years Apple has produced some of the most enviable and desirable hardware of any industry, not just tech. Setting the benchmark for laptop and phone design that spawned hundreds of clones and only in the last few years have PC manufacturers begun to catch up.
The notch was first introduced into iPhones to house the sensors that enabled Face ID. A system that still hasn’t been replicated with quite the same level of security and finesse on any competing platform. This later morphed into “Dynamic Island”, which made a feature of the cutout, shrank it and integrated it further into iOS. But no matter how much you make it a “feature”, your display still has a hole in it.
When the MacBook Pro launched in 2021 the notched screen caused a bit of a stir both aesthetically and by forcing developers to modify their apps. Marketed as a way to put a passable camera into an otherwise thin bezel (something that Dell managed to achieve around the same time with admittedly poor results) leading many speculate that this would eventually be populated with Face ID. As it stands, the Macbook notch is slightly taller than an iPhone 12 when including the bezel, yet doesn't contain even half the stuff an iPhone does. As we approach the 3rd iteration of the Macbook Air, and the 4th iteration of the Macbook Pro will we still have to pretend the notch doesn't exist?
The MacBook Pro refresh is set to release in late 2024, and the Air in 2025, but no physical design changes are expected to be made, which will most likely still leave us with notched displays.
Sure, you can hide the notch in the settings on your mac by choosing a resolution that scales to 16:10, but this effectively disables the top 74 rows of the display. If you’ve got the pixels you should be able to use them. Equally, you can live with the notch and software makes it as un-invasive as possible, or hide it with one of the many 3rd party apps. However, these solutions are like taking a sledgehammer to a nut, using software trickery to hide a flaw that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Until Apple finally embeds face ID into the bezel of their MacBooks, the notch has no reason to exist, even then it’s questionable. In 2024, manufacturers are quite capable of putting a webcam and array of sensors into a thin bezel. Windows Hello seems to work pretty well, has been around since 2015 and as yet still hasn’t required a notch. The fact that nobody has copied such a design suggests that Apple is not onto a winning strategy.
The last few MacBook iterations broke with tradition and gave back a decent port selection, magsafe and a better keyboard. However, the notch will likely still remain, and continue to be one of the most baffling design choices Apple has ever made.
Despite all this, MacBooks still remain one of the most well built, best supported and fastest laptops currently on the Market, and if you are happy to skip the M3 chip the outgoing 2022 MacBook Air M2 is on sale at Amazon* for a very reasonable $849.99.
