That notch on the new MacBook Pros, and thoughts on hardware design

Tech Life

Oh boy, where to begin?

As usual, when faced with new designs and solutions — and with pretty much anything else, really — we have an emotional response followed by a more rational assessment. Sometimes, things that initially don’t seem to make sense to our emotional part, or that rub us up the wrong way, are later rationalised and we begin to understand, even accept, why they’re there.

When I was following the Unleashed Apple event on 18 October, and Apple revealed the design for the new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, I was initially surprised to see certain details that hark back to the Titanium and Aluminium PowerBooks — details that admittedly struck the right nostalgia chord in me. But when I saw that their displays featured an iPhone-like notch right there at the top, I went into a fit of rage and punched my side desk so hard that my G4 Cube woke up from sleep.

For the 10–15 minutes after that moment, I tuned out everything that was said in the MacBook Pro introduction. I was in a state that could be described as a sort of shell shock. I know it sounds so dramatic, but that’s how I was feeling. Then I came back and started processing everything, waiting for my rational side to kick in and help me analyse and understand this new design choice on Apple’s part that, on the surface, makes absolutely no sense to me. It’s better I cool down and write about this in a few days, I said to myself.

Well, here we are. It’s Rick’s rational side speaking, and this notch on the Mac makes absolutely no sense to me either. It’s a stupid, unnecessary detail that doesn’t really solve any problem, but creates a few. And while I understand that a notch is a compromise on the iPhone because the front camera array is more sophisticated as it has to take care of FaceID authentication, on the Mac this was completely avoidable. The front camera is just a regular webcam, though at least it’s HD.

The most common reactions I’ve heard from people who don’t oppose the notch are:

  1. It’s not a big deal: After a while you won’t even notice it. / It doesn’t really get in your way anyway.
  2. It’s actually a good thing because you gain more screen real estate. This added real estate is basically the area that should have belonged to the bezel at the sides of the webcam and that is now recessed and part of the display. See this tweet from David Pogue to visualise it.

Objection to №1, After a while you won’t even notice it. / It doesn’t really get in your way anyway.

I don’t think this is going to work like with the iPhone. On the iPhone, the interaction with the notch area is minimal. Your eyes start filtering out the notch because when you use the phone they’re often focused elsewhere on the screen. On the iPhone, the notch may become noticeable again whenever some activity happening on the screen makes it stand out, e.g. when playing a fullscreen video in landscape mode. 

On the Mac it’s a different story, in my opinion. On the Mac, the notch visually splits the menu bar, a UI element you interact with all the time. The notch covers, occupies a part of the menu bar that could be devoted to displaying menu items and menu extras. This isn’t a real problem when you have apps with just a few menus. But with more sophisticated and professional apps, with many menus on the menu bar reaching and even surpassing the middle point, then yes, the notch is definitely in your way and you can’t tell me you’re not going to notice it. When you launch an app with lots of menus on one of the new MacBook Pros, all the ‘excess menus’ will get moved on the right, and the notch will of course be a sort of gap between them. So, according to Linda Dong (Apple Design Evangelist), developers now need to take the notch into account when designing their apps (more unnecessary work for them, but who cares, right Apple?) and says:

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. 

And I say here what I said on Twitter: for usability’s sake there shouldn’t be a notch in the first place. Hunting through a million menus may not be fun, but it’s certainly better and clearer than deciphering tiny icons and controls in an app toolbar or panel. If you stop and think about it, it’s utterly ludicrous that a developer should alter their app design to accommodate an element which was arbitrarily put in place by Apple and that is so intrusive it can’t possibly help developers make their app better, UI-wise or usability-wise.

But the problems in the menu bar also come from the right: the increasing amount of menu extras (icons). If my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro had a notch, it would already be problematic and I would be forced to resort to third-party solutions like Bartender to hide most of the menu extras. Don’t get me wrong, Bartender is a great tool, but I want to see those menu extras all the time, because some of them indicate a state, and don’t simply function as a clickable element to access application options. 

Again, the notch is an unnecessary hindrance, because even in the best case scenario, it makes you reconsider the way you interact with menu bar elements.

Objection to №2, It’s actually a good thing because you gain more screen real estate.

I thought about this, and my answer is, You gain very little, and it’s not worth the hassle.

The added strip of pixels at the sides of the notch serves to accommodate the menu bar, so in normal use, and compared with a MacBook with a regular top bezel, what you gain vertically is just that, a bunch of pixels corresponding to the height of the menu bar. If you use an app in fullscreen mode, it won’t make use of the extra space on top. The app’s interface will be displayed in the ‘safe area’ below the notch. In other words, when fullscreen, you’ll have the same available space as on a Mac with a regular bezel.

In other words, you gain very little. This is the same misguided principle driving the redesign in Safari 15, at least initially, when according to the genius designers at Apple, having the address bar and the row of browser tabs on the same line is great because you would gain more vertical space to display a website. We are not living in the late 1990s anymore. We’re not dealing with screen resolutions of 640×480 or 800×600 pixels where every trick to gain vertical space was more than welcome. These are dense retina displays with 3024×1964 and 3456×2234 pixels for the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros, respectively. The vertical ‘gained space’ amounts to what, 30 pixels? Come on.

A few thoughts about Mac hardware design in recent years

By ‘hardware design’ here I’m not referring to the internals, but to the outer industrial design. A few days ago someone on Twitter said or maybe referenced an article saying that Mac hardware design has actually improved since Jonathan Ive’s departure. Someone else suggested that, since designing hardware is a time-consuming process that doesn’t happen over a few weeks, it was possible that the design process for these latest MacBook Pros started when Ive was still at Apple. I have no idea. I may not have liked every design decision made by Ive, and while he brought the notch on the iPhone, I seriously doubt he would have approved the same solution on the Mac.

Certain details and solutions of Ive’s designs may have been opinionated, but at least reflected a strong personality with actual opinions that shaped the design. The hardware design of recent Macs, instead, feels like the work of a committee… of design students. The M1 24-inch iMac looks like a design exercise where the assignment is Make the thinnest possible desktop Mac. Don’t question why it has to be the thinnest, just do it.

MacBook design is now at its most iterative and regurgitative. The current M1 MacBook Air perpetuates the same wedge-like profile as the late-2010 model, and the display assembly design is essentially the same as the 2015 12-inch retina MacBook. MacBook Pros have retained the same design since they went unibody in 2008. Over the years they’ve become thinner, their trackpads bigger and wider (too big and wide, if you ask me), and some models acquired a Touch Bar at the top of the keyboard.

If the design of the newest MacBook Pros finally breaks this decade-long iterative path, on the other hand it can be seen as a remix of previously-executed design cues. The truly distinctive details are the visibly protruding feet and the notch on the display. I am obviously not a fan of either, but I understand that those taller feet are part of the thermal design of the MacBook Pro, and will help in keeping the computer cooler when under load. The notch is the truly gratuitous, unnecessary novelty that sometimes I think was put there by Apple’s design team as retribution for having to remove the Touch Bar. 

Seriously now, and circling back 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. This, among other things, makes me wonder whether there’s still a strong industrial design leader within Apple. Someone who looks at the final display design drafts, sees the notch, and utters, What the fuck is this?

As an outside observer and long-time Mac user, I feel a certain lack of direction and, dare I say, resolve in many areas of Apple’s hardware and software design. Look at the progression of desktop & laptop computer designs and port selection under Jobs’s tenure. How many times Jobs’s Apple made a hardware design decision that had to be overturned later because something about such decision went nowhere or was not well accepted? The only oddity that comes to mind (and it’s a rather mild one) was the late 2008 aluminium unibody MacBook (non Pro). When this MacBook was introduced, many thought Apple would bring aluminium and a premium finish even to the consumer-oriented MacBook line, after years of polycarbonate iBooks and MacBooks. But then, in 2009, this 13-inch MacBook became the 13-inch MacBook Pro, joining the 15 and 17-inch models, and the humble MacBook went back to being made in white durable polycarbonate for two more iterations.

Now we see ports that were previously ‘courageously’ removed making their return, triumphantly announced as if they were a magnanimous concession on Apple’s part because “Apple has listened to the feedback from their pro users”. If you need to be told that removing MagSafe, the HDMI port, and the SD card slot is a bad idea; if you need to be told — and showed, many many times — that the butterfly mechanism in MacBook’s keyboards is a bad implementation, then you’re not doing a good job at designing hardware. You just make edgy design choices to ‘try new angles’ and hope that you’ll be validated by your reputation. 

The Touch Bar is another odd case: I think the idea had potential, but it has felt like an unfinished project. It could have been iterated and improved upon in so many ways, but it’s like Apple gave up on it. Oh, you don’t like it much. Yeah, okay, we’re getting rid of it, whatever. Why not implement the Touch Bar as an additional strip placed at a slight angle above a full keyboard, instead of using it to replace the top row of keys? Heck, why not place the Touch Bar in the bezel area below the screen, making its customisable controls way more glanceable and operable?

I’ve said it too many times now: part of Apple’s software and hardware design today feels more random, haphazard and trial-and-error than before. I know well that trial and error is an important part of the design process, but with today’s Apple it feels as if this part of the process isn’t happening internally enough, if you know what I mean. It feels that we as users (or developers) are subtly getting involved in it. It feels like a public beta. Some actually like this — those who later write articles talking about how great it is that Apple listens to its users. I would like from Apple a more internally pondered design process that leads to more thoughtful design decisions, executed with the confidence that this is the path to follow and build upon. The notch is a quirk that goes nowhere.

The Author

Writer. Translator. Mac consultant. Enthusiast photographer. • If you like what I write, please consider supporting my writing by purchasing my short stories, Minigrooves or by making a donation. Thank you!