From John Gruber’s review of the M2 MacBook Air:

There’s a notch. This looks weird at first, I know. But, as someone who’s been using a notched 14-inch MacBook Pro for months, trust me, you stop thinking about it after a few days. It’s a little bit weird when you use an app that has so many menus that one or more of them fall on the far side of the notch, but I don’t regularly use any apps with that many menus. I’ve got 26 apps running on this MacBook Air right now, and not one of them has too many menus to fit on the left of the notch¹.

In that footnote at the end of the paragraph, Gruber adds:

BBEdit and Safari come the closest among my currently-running apps. Safari, because I have both its optional Develop and Debug menus enabled. One app I occasionally use that does have menus that span the notch gap is Safari Technology Preview — because the name of the app itself in the menu bar takes up so much space.

The way he talks about the notch is pretty much the way everyone who has purchased or tested a notched MacBook talks about it, and the way everyone who has ever owned an iPhone with a notch talks about it. It boils down to, Yes, there’s a notch, but you get accustomed to it very quickly and it’s not a big deal.

I am sick and tired of being gaslighted about this. See, the notch is a design detail / design decision that positively angers me, but every time I vent my frustration about it, a lot of tech people out there react as if I were the crazy person, the now proverbial “old man yelling at cloud”, to cite a popular meme.

What also angers me is this casual normalisation of the notch’s presence, like it’s just a little quirk of good old Apple. Heck, in several places across the Web I’ve even read that the notch is what now makes Apple’s devices distinctive. Do you realise how bonkers that sounds? When has an Apple product, especially phones and computers, not been distinctive? Have you ever watched a film or TV series where blatant product placement was not allowed, so they had to use computers and devices with their logos covered or removed? You can recognise a MacBook, an iMac, an iPhone, a mile away. If anything, the notch is what today makes Apple devices distinctively jarring from a design standpoint.

If we look at the notch from a design is how it looks perspective, it is an egregiously hideous detail, both on iPhones and MacBooks. It’s this black strip that looks like someone redacted a part of the display. It’s this dead zone that looks like someone cut off a bit from the display. It’s also a detail that deforms the natural, rectangular shape of any display, of any screen.

If we look at the notch from a design is how it works perspective, it’s a bad design compromise. On iPhones (and on Android phones that copied its design) it has almost completely neutralised the usefulness of the status bar. On Macs, it has split the menu bar in two, creating an unnecessary interference with menus and menu bar icons (or menu extras, as they’re called). And for what? For thinner bezels and a little increase in screen real estate at the top left and top right? (Today’s tech obsession with thinner and thinner bezels deserves a study of its own, by the way). When you go fullscreen, having a MacBook with a traditional display and having a MacBook with a notched display makes no difference, because the usable application space remains essentially the same. You don’t ‘gain’ space.

As I’ve previously written,

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.

[…]

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.

I keep hearing the same song, that the design of the M‑series MacBook Pros and now MacBook Air is the best design we’ve seen from Apple in ages. But I’m not 100% sure about that. (Between you and me, the true peak of MacBook design are the 2015 MacBook Pros). There are certainly praiseworthy details in the industrial design. The hinge’s design, a (finally!) better keyboard, the almost complete disappearance of the Touch Bar from the product line, the overall thermal design on the inside, and the sheer elegance these computers exude when you look at them closed — they look like aluminium slabs carved from a single block of material.

But trackpads are still too big. And that notch is like a gash on the chassis of an otherwise pristine Ferrari. Apple has a decades-long industrial design pedigree. For years their hardware design dictated what was beautiful, functional, cool, and fun in the computer industry. Now I have to read bullshit like The notch is what makes an Apple device distinctive, and I’m the crazy one because I get angry about it? The notch is a design stain in Apple’s reputation. It’s a disgrace that should be repeatedly pointed at and laughed until Apple decides to change course. Exactly like the keyboard with the butterfly mechanism. Too bad that people are opportunistic: they got angry at Apple for that flawed keyboard design because it actually prevented them from using the computer properly. The notch… eh, it can be ignored because wow, look at the fantastic performance of these M‑class MacBooks! Who cares about that black spot? It can be hidden and everyone’s happy!

Even Gruber, in his review of the M2 MacBook Air doesn’t even mention the notch in the section about “What could be better on the Air?” If I had a review unit of that machine, I would lead this part of the review with, The first thing that could be improved on this MacBook Air is the display, starting with the removal of that thing at the top.

The notch should be constantly criticised even if it doesn’t bother you, because it’s bad design; because it’s wrong design. Because there’s nothing essentially advantageous about it. Or beautiful, or functional, or cool, or fun. That part of the MacBook’s display should be treated like a sore spot, where you point and say, There’s room for improvement here.

[Update, 19 July 2022 — Nick Heer points out, both on Twitter and in his piece about the 14-inch MacBook Pro he recently purchased, that the notch allows Apple to put a 14-inch display in a machine that is physically smaller than the 13-inch MacBook Air (the pre-retina model), and that for him this is an acceptable-enough compromise to not make him hate the notch as much as I do. What can I say: while it’s true that the 14-inch MacBook Pro is smaller than the old 13-inch Air, the measurements indicate that the difference is negligible (1.24 cm in width, 0.58 cm in depth), and the presence of the notch to me is more an indicator of Apple’s failure to fit a bigger screen in a smaller lid — the notch itself is a testament to the fact that this couldn’t have been done without sacrificing something. This was not a clean design operation. Again, most Mac users will probably consider this an acceptable sacrifice. I’m not one of them.]

And in case you were wondering, I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I’m still using an iPhone 8, my next iPhone will very probably be a third-generation SE (which has the exact same notchless design as the 8), and I won’t purchase any of the flagship iPhones until the notch disappears from their displays.

On the Mac front things are a bit more problematic. Now that the notch is contaminating the MacBook design, I’m in the same position as I was back in 2018: at the time I didn’t want to get a new MacBook as an upgrade because of the butterfly keyboard fiasco, so I opted for a desktop Mac (iMac 21.5‑inch 4K). Now I refuse to purchase a MacBook with a notch because I simply do not want to reward such an absurd design decision with my money. So I’m once again looking at desktop Macs. An M2 Mac mini paired with a good monitor is definitely going to be a great replacement for my 2017 iMac. And in case I also need an Apple Silicon laptop, an M1 MacBook Air is probably going to be just fine for my needs. Still, it’s a bit of a frustrating situation for someone like me who simply cannot ignore the notch, no matter how loudly you tell me that it’s not a big deal.

Especially you there… yes you, who for years kept telling me how much you hated the design of the iMac G3’s round mouse.

Don’t normalise the notch. Don’t let Apple designers think it’s a good idea. This is not the ‘good’ Think Different of 25 years ago.

“The notch is wrong” was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 17 July 2022.