Skimming through the comments in this thread, I'm uncertain what people think goes on during the design and manufacturing phase at a hardware company at the sca

Skimming through the comments in this thread, I'm uncertain what people think goes on during the design and manufacturing phase at a hardware company at the scale of Apple (and if someone does quite a bit in this space, I'd love to hear from industrial designers and folks in supply-chain manufacturing). At the design phase for FaceID, competing designs are presented, each with their own tradeoffs. These are then culled further for a manufacturing phase, where the design is further iterated on. Finally, they are presented with the limitations of supply-chain and engineering. Why would a company at Apple's scale not test out many different variations and ask the question: why the notch > black bar on the top (or even embedded into the device itself)? From a marketing perspective, a black bar would have been worse - less distinctive, less screen, potentially more noticeable in a bad way ("the screen you don't have", "wasteful"). The complaints may have been similar. Given the compromises between the target device size, actual requirements of FaceID, and distinctive look, I'd say Apple hit their goals and the market is mostly receptive.