Apple’s botched ‘notch’ atop iPhone X’s display is a design abomination
“Early looks at the iPhone X are missing something — a little bit of every video and a chunk of many games,” Sascha Segan writes for PC Magazine. “That’s because some content on full-screen apps in landscape mode is covered by the ‘notch,’ or the black area at the top of the screen housing the front-facing camera and sensors.”
“Why the notch? Apple wanted to do a bezel-less display, but there’s no technology (yet?) for putting a camera under a display,” Segan writes. “Since Apple wanted to hide the iPhone X’s specs from developers until the last minute, third-party app developers weren’t ready for the notch. But iPhone X doesn’t arrive until Nov. 3, so popular apps have time to get notch-worthy.”
“According to iPhone developers on Twitter, Apple is now pushing out guidelines that tell them to embrace the notch. Don’t block it off, but also don’t draw attention to it, Cupertino says. It’s a lemon of a ‘feature,’ and the best Apple can do right now is to make lemonade,” Segan writes. “I’m sure app developers will work around the notch.”
Unapologetically notched. Again, it’s an “inelegant kludge.” If Apple could’ve embedded the sensors behind/into the display they most certainly would have done so.
“For more than a decade, our intention has been to make an iPhone that is all display. A physical object that disappears into the experience.” — Jony Ive, September 12, 2017
We’re not there yet, so Apple is making some lemonade.
The iPhone X’s nasty notch is certainly a design compromise (see below), but rather than try to hide it (and likely fail), Apple chose to embrace it (à la the iPhone 5C’s “unapologetically plastic” marketing). You take your most glaring weakness and celebrate it as a feature. Marketing 101.
Jony Ive’s “design inspiration” for iPhone X appears to have been a plastic clipboard: Plastic clipboard (left), iPhone X (right)
A far better, much more elegant, better looking and better functioning design solution than the one at which Apple’s Jony Ive & Co. and/or Craig Federighi inexplicably arrived, courtesy of Nodus and Gordon Kelly via Forbes from back in July shows how iPhone X’s notch should have been handled:
iPhone X notch un-botched by Forbes’ Gordon Kelly and Nodus
iPhone X notch un-botched by Forbes’ Gordon Kelly and Nodus
Even if the status bars simply stayed “sideways” when in landscape, this is a more elegant solution than Apple’s current kludge. The simple solution is oftentimes better.
Ive & Co.’s design choice is even more inexplicable when you realize they already have the answer staring them in the face all day: The Mac’s menu bar.
(Even though the clock just struck five, the interns have already done their jobs today! Prost, everyone!)
