Two weeks ago I published a piece that was essentially about something I needed to get out of my system, because I was starting to feel like I was the weird one for maintaining a strong negative stance on the subject. I’m talking about the so-called notch, a questionable design element that Apple, after featuring it on iPhones for many iterations, deemed worthy of applying to Mac laptops as well.
Unlike many people, whose reaction to the notch was just a shrug — both when it debuted on the iPhone X in 2017 and on the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros in 2021 — I was extremely put off by it. Especially when it appeared on Macs.
Back in October 2021, when reacting to the first notch appearance on the then-freshly introduced MacBook Pros, I wrote:
[B]ack to the notch: it was completely avoidable. You can justify it however you want, but it has the same fundamental characteristic as its iPhone counterpart — it’s just plain ugly. It is indeed a design compromise on the iPhone because on such a portable device on the one hand there’s the need to maximise screen real estate, and on the other there’s the simple fact that you have to provide a sophisticated front-facing camera with the necessary technology to enable FaceID. So you design a display with a screen that reaches the top where possible, i.e. the area surrounding the notch. You provide as many pixels as possible given the circumstances.
And yes, putting that notch on the MacBook Pros might have originated from the same impulse — maximising screen real estate. But while on the iPhone this was a need, on the Mac it’s just a want. Again, with displays as big and pixel-dense as those in the new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro models there’s no need to maximise screen real estate. You don’t need to carve a space up top where to shoehorn the menu bar, as if it were an annoying, restricting UI element, and splitting it up in the process. To me, this makes no sense from a design-is-how-it-works standpoint. It looks like an urge to make a design statement for design statement’s sake — as if Apple products needed some signature design quirk to be recognisable.
Ever since the notch’s introduction as a design element on Macs, every time I engaged in some discussion about it, other people made me feel as if I was the silly one for reacting so strongly about it. Why are you making such a big fuss about it? and What’s the big deal? were among the most typical responses I’d receive.
The feedback I got tells a different story
At the time of writing I’ve received a total of 61 email messages about my article The notch is wrong. Of these, 55 are from people who essentially wrote to thank me for writing that piece and almost every one of them added something along the lines of “I thought I was going crazy and was the only one who hated the notch that much”. I admit that this kind of feedback made me feel much better and even a bit vindicated.
Of the remaining 6 messages, 3 were kind of neutral about the notch (for example, J.A. wrote “I do get your criticism, I’m not a fan of the notch either, but I’ve got accustomed to it and when using my MacBook Pro it doesn’t really bother me.”), and 3 were instead quite supportive of the notch.
This is just anecdotal data, of course, but it’s interesting to see that these 61 emails came from all over the world (it’s a guess based on people’s names — I’ve recognised English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Korean, Indian and Japanese names) and from people of varying degrees of tech-savvy. In other words this sample, however small, didn’t feel like originating from the same ‘bubble’, so to speak.
Two important points I should have articulated better in my previous article
When I consider the remaining 6 emails, those with the neutral-to-positive stance towards the notch, in at least 4 of them my correspondents wrote something like, “Your piece sort of makes me feel judged by deciding to purchase a MacBook with a notch, almost as if I were told that I have bad taste when it comes to design”.
And the second thing common to many emails was something like “Yeah I don’t think the notch is ultimately that big of a deal; believe me, you stop noticing it after a few days, it really is unobtrusive”.
Responding to these remarks, I want two things to be especially clear in my harsh criticism of the notch:
- I’m definitely not passing judgement on those people who have purchased or thought about purchasing ‘notched’ MacBooks. The 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros are exceptional machines, and the M2 MacBook Air is a capable all-purpose laptop. Save for the notch and a few other small details, I generally love the design of these Macs, and I’m really happy if they’re the solution that best fits your needs. What can you do about the notch? Nothing, really; it’s something Apple forces down your throat whether you like or not. It’s not you, customer, who has bad taste in design here — it’s Apple.
- My criticism of the notch is purely design-oriented. The point I’m trying to make is that we shouldn’t think of the notch as good or bad design depending on if and how much we ‘notice’ it. But that the notch is bad design whether we notice it or not, whether it bothers us little or very very much.
Could it merely be an æsthetic concern?
F.W. writes me:
Don’t you think that your dislike for the notch is merely a matter of looks rather than functionality? If functionality isn’t really impacted, shouldn’t we conclude that the notch isn’t that deeply flawed as your critique would imply?
It’s a good question. While I think a great part of my aversion to the notch is indubitably tied to its visual ugliness, I don’t agree that the notch doesn’t really impact functionality. If Apple itself tells developers they need to take the notch into account when designing their apps, then Apple itself is recognising that the notch could potentially be an issue, functionality-wise. I keep quoting this tweet from Linda Dong (Apple Design Evangelist) because I think it’s very telling of the kind of approach Apple’s having here:
Either way it’s still a great idea to keep menu bar titles short and consolidate menus when you can for usability’s sake! Hunting through a million menus is never fun even on pro software.
She’s suggesting to keep menu bar titles short and consolidate menus because otherwise this happens:
In one of the feedback emails I received, one of my readers attached this screenshot taken from Marques Brownlee’s review of the M2 MacBook Air, where you can see Pixelmator Pro in use (a damn good app, by the way). The annotations are mine.
What she’s suggesting is actually not a good idea for usability’s sake. It’s just a suggestion to avoid making Apple look bad for having arbitrarily introduced a hardware detail that actively interferes with one of the most important UI elements in the whole operating system — the menu bar.
Apple introduces the notch, and then developers have to do unnecessary extra work on their apps to mitigate the potential interference of this element.
- Keep menu bar titles short — this doesn’t take into account at all any other language that isn’t English, Chinese or Japanese. Just take the Finder menu bar titles. In English, they are Finder, File, Edit, View, Go, Window, Help. All short words, most are 4‑character long; the longest is 6‑character long. In German, the Finder menu bar titles become: Finder, Ablage, Bearbeiten, Darstellung, Gehe zu, Fenster, Hilfe. In Spanish we have Finder, Archivo, Edición, Visualización, Ir, Ventana, Ayuda. Not all languages can afford short words. But even if we just stick to English, menu titles should be as clear and descriptive as possible. They shouldn’t be kept artificially short to accommodate a questionable design compromise.
- Consolidate menus — “Hunting through a million menus is never fun even on pro software”, Dong says. You know what’s not fun either? Scrolling unnecessarily long menus because you had to consolidate into one menu a series of commands that were previously spread across three menus and it made sense that they were spread this way. Changing places to commands because you need to consolidate menus and reduce the number of menu bar titles because there’s the real possibility that they will collide with the notch, is the polar opposite of doing good usability. Same if you think you could maybe transform a list of menu commands into a popover or drop-down menu hidden behind an icon on a toolbar.
Some wrote me that they still haven’t encountered applications with menus that get displaced and pushed to the right of the menu bar by the presence of the notch. I don’t have recent Adobe Creative apps (the last suite I used is the CS3), so I can’t check, but historically apps like Photoshop and InDesign have had plenty of menu bar titles. Not long ago I also tried out Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher, and I remember that the menu bar was pretty crowded. Between menu titles and all the menu extra I usually keep on my 13-inch MacBook Pro, I’m pretty sure that if my MacBook Pro had a notch, there would have been disruption up there in the menu bar.
The screen real estate gains purportedly allowed by the notch
This is perhaps the strongest argument I’ve heard from people who don’t mind (or actually welcome) the notch. And while they’re not technically wrong, I still think that what the notch gives you, display-wise, is in most cases simply not enough to justify such kind of design compromise.
If we compare a 13.3‑inch M1 MacBook Air with a 13.6‑inch M2 MacBook Air, their screen resolution is horizontally identical (2560 pixels), while vertically the M2 Air is 64 pixels taller than the M1 Air (1664 vs 1600). Those 64 pixels are essentially the height of the menu bar (split by the notch in the middle). And that is the total of ‘new’, really additional space you have on an M2 Air compared with the M1 model. Yes, the M2 Air has a physically bigger display than the M1 Air, but since the resolution is essentially the same, you won’t see more stuff on the M2 Air’s display. For the most part, you’ll see the same stuff as on the M1 Air, but slightly enlarged. Again, the only real space you gain is 64 pixels vertically.
And while the M2 MacBook Air has physical dimensions that are impressively close to the M1 MacBook Air, the latter is still a tiny bit shorter in height. Just today I picked up both computers in an electronics store, and their overall mass feels essentially the same. The M2 Air weighs 50 grams less than the M1 Air, but when holding both Macs, I couldn’t really tell the difference. One is not dramatically lighter or more compact than the other. But the thinner bezels of the M2 Air really do the trick. The display is bigger than the M1 Air by 0.3 inch diagonally, but feels bigger too. It’s a well-engineered deception (in the sense that, yes, it’s physically bigger, but the only added screen real estate are those 64 vertical pixels).
Another interesting comparison is between the older 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro and the 2021 M1 Pro/M1 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro that features the notch. Resolution-wise, the newer MacBook Pro clearly wins (3456×2234 vs 3072×1920), so here there is a substantial increase in screen real estate compared with the 2019 Intel 16-inch MacBook Pro, but the M‑class 16-inch MacBook Pro is actually thicker, taller, and heavier than the 2019 Intel model, while having essentially the same width (35.57 cm vs 35.79 cm of the Intel model). So yes, here you indeed have a bigger screen in a Mac that is more or less the same size of the previous Intel model, but you don’t end up with a more compact form factor.
The ‘winner’ here is probably the 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro, but it’s also the hardest laptop to draw a fair comparison with. We could compare display size, resolution, and the machine’s physical dimensions with the short-lived 2019 15-inch MacBook Pro, but that comparison has already been won by the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro itself, having a bigger display, better resolution, and surprisingly similar physical dimensions.
Maybe we could pit the 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro against the 2020 M1 or 2022 M2 13-inch MacBook Pro. And here, the former clearly wins on all aspects: bigger display, better resolution, only roughly 1 cm taller and wider. 200 grams heavier, but given the appreciable performance leap, you can forgive that. The only big difference here is price. If you have a relatively tight budget, there is no compactness or bigger screen advantage for you, you’ll have to choose a smaller, more affordable MacBook. If you don’t mind the notch, the M2 Air may work for you. If the notch annoys you, you want the M2 chip, and don’t mind the Touch Bar, then it’s the base 13-inch MacBook Pro. Otherwise, the best option still remains the M1 Air, in my opinion.
The point of all this long-winded excursion about screen sizes, resolutions and Mac laptop’s physical dimensions is that — except the 14-inch M‑class MacBook Pro — the ‘notched’ display design doesn’t really give that substantial an advantage over a ‘non-notched’ display with a thicker top bezel. Especially in the M2 Air vs M1 Air comparison.
Again, the focus here remains on a purely design-oriented speculation. Pragmatically, lots of customers will chose the ‘notched’ MacBooks because they offer many other tangible advantages: faster chips, more memory, qualitatively better display panel technology, more ports, etc. When you consider these specs and your needs, you clearly give them precedence over design considerations about a funny notch. Here I openly recognise I’m in a stark minority, since I’m not willing to give in, and I won’t purchase a Mac laptop that has a notch, no matter what. It bothers and upsets me too much on a conceptual level for me to ignore it. That’s me, and I’m perfectly aware of my principled stubbornness here.
But I’m very glad for all the feedback I’ve received so far. My sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to write me an email on the subject. At least I don’t feel alone or misunderstood in my strong aversion to the notch. I’m still hopeful that this design compromise will only last a few years and will be discarded in the next major MacBook redesign.