14 ms·

Am I the only one who finds screens with rounded corners and notches really stupid? We had to struggle for decades with CRTs and their funky geometry, and when

Am I the only one who finds screens with rounded corners and notches really stupid? We had to struggle for decades with CRTs and their funky geometry, and when we finally get displays with perfect geometry, we botch them again to make them look... cooler?

crazygringo 1y ago
Don't think of notches as something stupid that takes away from screen area. Think of them as something that allows the overall screen area to increase, as bevels shrink. And then when the corners of the screen are so close to the corner of the laptop, and the corner of the laptop is rounded, it looks weird if the corner of the screen isn't rounded. Like a square peg in a round hole. Fortunately, it's all context-dependent. So when you watch a video that is inherently rectangular on a Mac, that takes precedence. It's only shown below the notch, and the rounded corners on the bottom disappear. So it's kind of the best of all worlds. Bigger screen with round corners for actual work (the notch is not particularly objectionable in the menu bar), slightly smaller screen with rectangular corners for video (and games too I assume?).
- ratmeadow 1y ago
  Is bevel size really so important when it's already measured in mm? Personally I like a bit of bevel because I don't want the screen going to the edge of the device. The edge of the device is for holding, not interaction.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    No, screen size is important. For the same size laptop, less bevel means more screen. And I don't about you but I don't hold the screen half of my laptop. Not unless the laptop is closed. So I don't see how that's a concern.
    - pezezin 1y ago
      But a cell phone, maybe. For a laptop, we are talking about a couple of millimetres on each side max, it is not a big deal.
      - userbinator 1y ago
        ...and then the same "more space!!!111" people run apps which fill their screen with useless whitespace.
        LtWorf 1y ago
        I mean… I would be very happy to whip designers in public but I think that's illegal.
    - mikestew 1y ago
      For the love of $DEITY, it’s bezel! :-) https://www.howtogeek.com/762611/what-is-a-bezel/ https://www.howtogeek.com/762611/what-is-a-bezel/
      - mcv 1y ago
        I've often wondered about that, because I often see them used interchangeably (and not just here). But you're absolutely right. Here's a random site I found that explains it: https://www.difference.wiki/bevel-vs-bezel/ https://www.difference.wiki/bevel-vs-bezel/ Is the similarity of the word the only reason they often get mixed up? I think another factor is that flat surfaces surrounded by an angled bevel are fairly common. For example. I just noticed that the bezel of one of my monitors is also beveled.
      - bregma 1y ago
        The bezel on my monitor has a bevel.
      - crazygringo 1y ago
        TIL. Thank you! Suddenly realizing I've had the words confused my whole life :S
- eviks 1y ago
  > then when the corners of the screen are so close to the corner of the laptop, and the corner of the laptop is rounded, it looks weird if the corner of the screen isn't rounded. The rounded laptop corners is a similar design decision. And also it doesn't look weird to me at all compared to rounded corners for windows, especially when they introduce visible desktop garbage in those now-not-perfectly-covering-rectangles corner areas
  - Etheryte 1y ago
    Rounded corners are not simply an aesthetic design choice, they make the device more durable as there's less of a pinch point when you drop, snag or mishandle the device.
- troupo 1y ago
  The notch reduces the space available in the top menu bar. And since Apple is still incapable of creating a built-in Bartender-like functionality you end up with less space on screen. It's an actual objective fact of life. You don't get a larger 15"/16"/17" inch screen. You get a screen that size minus the notch because of a psychotic obsession with thinness. And then they struggle to compensate for that with barely working workarounds in software that don't cover even half of cases.
  - monsieurbanana 1y ago
    I don't understand your logic unless you're implicitly saying the camera needs to go away, but then you should say so (so that I can properly disagree with you). The notch makes for a smaller menu bar but without the notch there would be no menu bar there, it would take the space underneath instead.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - troupo 1y ago
      > I don't understand your logic unless you're implicitly saying the camera needs to go away Yup. We never had camera before the notch. > The notch makes for a smaller menu bar but without the notch there would be no menu bar there Yup. Before the notch we neither had a menu bar that could comfortably fit most menu items even in professional apps, nor did we have a camera. BTW, you literally are saying "The notch makes for a smaller menu bar". Imagine if I wrote that as the first sentence in my comment, then there would be no misunderstanding
      - ylk 1y ago
        The screen is a 16:10 screen with some extra pixels added next to the notch. By default, the system uses a resolution of 1512x982 (14"), which you can change to 1512x945 (16:10) to move the menu bar below the notch and end up with black pixels next to the notch.
- anonymoushn 1y ago
  my menu icons are hiding behind the notch lol
- incrudible 1y ago
  First of all, you can not argue anyone out of thinking it looks stupid or ugly. That is a visceral subjective experience and the extra space or whatever does nothing to make up for it. Now for the bezels, mind that an equidistant circle (or squircle) radius converges to zero. So to avoid having a large inner radius, avoid a large outer radius. The Macbook is not a tablet, you do not hold its corners in your hand. However, at some point Apple must have decided that the squircle is its entire visual identity and that hard corners on the XY plane are bad. That creates design problems it would not otherwise have. The fact that developers are led into the trap of not pixel matching to the display however just shows a lack of attention to detail.
  - jameshart 1y ago
    The bottom corners of a MacBook screen are not rounded. The top corners are because the corners of the case are rounded. The corners of the case are rounded because you need to be able to do things like slide it into a laptop bag.
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      > The bottom corners of a MacBook screen are not rounded. They are on my M4 MBA. They're software-rounded rather than in the hardware. You can move the pointer over the lower rounded corners; you can't over the upper ones.
- pdpi 1y ago
  > Fortunately, it's all context-dependent. So when you watch a video that is inherently rectangular on a Mac, that takes precedence. It's only shown below the notch, and the rounded corners on the bottom disappear. Also, it's worth noting that notches are a hardware-specific. I haven't tried any of the MBAs with notches, but the MBPs have good-enough black levels that the notch just kind of vanishes into the black background when using full-screen apps.
bee_rider 1y ago
Are the screens OLED? The phones are... IMO the notch is pointless, but they need space for the front camera. With OLED they can just turn the pixels off when it suits the application and it becomes like a big bevel, which was the alternative anyway.
- MBCook 1y ago
  Expected in the next year or two on the pros, but not yet.
- buildbot 1y ago
  My M1 MacBook Pro turns off the display & backlight that would show the notch as needed, for example right now in full screen Safari you could not tell there is a notch/menu bar area at all. It's actually just as good as it can be already. Free extra space! Bezel not bevel FYI.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    The funny thing is, I had bezel initially, but saw so many instances of bevel here that I started to second-guess myself, haha.
bigstrat2003 1y ago
Nope. I think they're incredibly stupid as well.
- jama211 1y ago
  You realise you can use the largest rectangular section of the screen as a rectangular screen right? Play a video and you’ll see. It’s the best of both worlds
dlivingston 1y ago
I've got a MacBook with a notch and I literally never notice it. That's a common sentiment among MacBook users, btw -- I very rarely seeing people complain about the notch. I'm sure there are some, but seems to be a minority.
- bombcar 1y ago
  You didn’t lose pixels to the notch, you gained pixels beside it!
- bbrks 1y ago
  I frequently notice when my menubar items overflow and get truncated behind the notch with no built-in way to actually see them! You have to hoop jump with janky tools[1] that actually let you see and access the icons silently hidden because they overshot the notch. [1] https://macmenubar.com/menu-bar-managers/ https://macmenubar.com/menu-bar-managers/
  - MeneDev 1y ago
    I think nothing shows more that Apple has lost it’s eye for detail and good designs than the icons disappearing behind the notch.
  - jameshart 1y ago
    This has to be a vast gulf in terms of usage patterns for different users - I’ve managed at times to get up to six icons in my menu bar; what are you doing that fills up half the screen?
userbinator 1y ago
I've always preferred the look of non-antialiased fonts on an LCD for this reason - you can finally actually see the sharp square corners of a pixel, yet somehow many like the blurry smoothness of antialiasing to make the screen more like a CRT.
- userbinator 1y ago
  Please explain why you disagree?
  - bowsamic 1y ago
    People obviously think your comment is sarcastic
- Findecanor 1y ago
  I prefer text to be hinted and antialiased even in low resolutions on a CRT. The first time I saw this on BeOS in the 90s I thought it was a big step up. You get corners snapped to pixels without jagged lines in-between. However, hinting makes text wider or narrower depending on font size and resolution. Apple chose not to have hinting so as to make the text more dimensionally accurate. That did look blurry ... so Apple then doubled the screen resolution.
AceJohnny2 1y ago
It goes deep. obligatory: https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
jeffhuys 1y ago
Menu bar is on top on mac. I see it as the top bevel becoming a screen, not taking away from any screen real estate, actually FREEING up space for apps. I never see the notch anyway because my wallpaper is black.
- trinix912 1y ago
  Until you want to do something full screen, then it might be a glaring black rectangle on top of the screen. The way to do it properly is to hide the camera in the thin bezels or somewhere else (inside the LCD, are we there yet?). This is just a lazy solution that designers probably even thought seems iconic.
  - msh 1y ago
    But if you hide it in a small bezel or behind the LCD you will get significantly worse camera quality.
    - jeffhuys 1y ago
      The quality is already insane if you think about how thin it has to be, with "glass" in front of it and the alu behind it. Pinch it with your fingers, imagine a CAMERA being thinner than that... I feel like the only one that's still amazed by tech sometimes. I still look at planes and feel amazed we puny humans did that. It's never good enough.
  - jeffhuys 1y ago
    I get what you mean, but to me it just looks like before there was a notch, like there's no screen there. I can't really tell where the bezel ends and the screen starts if it's all black. Just looks like a large bezel. Guess it's just a matter of taste. I'm never bothered by it.
  - lilyball 1y ago
    Full screen stuff isn't supposed to go behind the notch, unless they opt in to supporting it. By default, fullscreen stuff just gets the notchless 16:10 area under the menubar, and the menubar area goes black, so the notch becomes invisible and nothing is "glaring", it just looks like the top bezel of the screen is larger.
floppyd 1y ago
I don't have a notched laptop screen, but I do like rounded corners, makes screens feel just a little bit more natural. My MacBook is older and doesn't have rounded corners, but I got used to them so much that I ended up simulating them in software.
- pezezin 1y ago
  More natural why? Paper doesn't (usually) have rounded corners and it looks pretty natural to me.
gwd 1y ago
Look, given current technology there are exactly three options: 1. Don't have a front-facing camera on your laptop. Your actual laptop screen can be as close to the edge of the laptop case as technology will allow, with no bevel. 2. Have a front-facing camera on your laptop, with no bevel. Your actual laptop screen is now square, but has to be 5mm shorter now. There's a 5mm strip at the top of your laptop that can't be used for anything. 3. Have a front-facing camera on your laptop, with a bevel. Now the actual laptop screen has a "dead space" in middle at the top, but can again be as close to the edge of the laptop case as technology will allow. There's a narrow strip at the top that can't be used for anything, but the area to the left and right of the bevel can. (A number 4 would be to somehow have a front-facing camera that operates without needing to displace screen area. Not clear how this would work without some complicated mechanism to extend the camera out the top of the screen, which would come with its own problems.) Now, the vast majority of the time, you're going to be using your Mac in a windowed environment, with menus on the left, indicators on the right, and absolutely nothing in the middle. In the case of #2, this menu bar has to take real estate from the top of your shorter screen, meaning that your windows are all 5mm shorter. #3 allows the menu bar and indicators to take up that space which on #2 is completely dead, freeing up extra space for your actual applications. And the key thing is this: For modern full-screen games, in #3, you (apparently) can't use the areas to the side of the bezel; but this is the same situation you're in in #2. IOW, as another commenter has said: The bevel design doesn't take away screen in the middle; it adds screen space on the side of the bevel. That said, the API here seems obviously mad: What's the point of giving you a resolution if it's going to silently resize it behind your back? It should either give you the resolution which it won't resize, or throw an error when you try to make one higher.
- dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
  While I agree in general with your comment, a small nitpick on this: > There's a 5mm strip at the top of your laptop that can't be used for anything. Well, it can - on mine I have a physical switch that allows me to block the lens, and it saved me a few times. (I just wish I had a similar one for the microphone.)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
julik 1y ago
No, you are not the only one
simondotau 1y ago
For what it's worth, Macintosh had rounded corners since its inception in 1984. They were just bitmaps in the screen corners and still addressable by software (and even by the mouse cursor in any context) but this demonstrates an aesthetic heritage. These software rounded corners disappeared in software when CRTs gave way to flat panels, but they are indisputably part of the Apple design aesthetic.
righthand 1y ago
Nope. I’m right there with you. I can’t even use my laptop undocked because half my applications use the toolbar to store their icon. So I have to plug my laptop into my monitor just to see what is in my screen space. I have no idea why people praise these laptops, for a cpu I guess. Their design is a joke and feels like a Playskool laptop toy. At least when the old Apple forced “phablets” as the standard phone size they included a software work around for reaching the top of the screen. Not adding a dropdown menu for the toolbar is brain dead.
- mthoms 1y ago
  Yeah, it's annoying. Try: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar https://www.macbartender.com https://www.macbartender.com I think there's a native solution (finally) coming in the next MacOS.
  - righthand 1y ago
    I’m not trying anything because it should have been implemented before launch natively. Not years after as part of some Product manager promotion cycle. Not installing a fix is how Apple wants me to use my machine by default in a broken state.
    - mthoms 1y ago
      In the time it took you to write your comments on this issue, you could have just fixed the problem. It's a valid complaint, don't get me wrong... but insisting on not fixing it as some sort of moral stance is only hurting yourself. People are weird, man.
      - righthand 1y ago
        I mostly work attached to a monitor. I will continue to work how I like, I don’t own a Macbook outside of work. I will continue not installing custom untrusted software just because a bunch of “fans” online told me to do it. I will continue complaining about it. All of that BECAUSE I enjoy the entropy it causes more than actually using the piece of garbage laptop. I can do a lot of things instead of write that comment. And installing work arounds for a trillion dollar company with an attitude problem is not one of them. Give attitude, get attitude. What’s weird is being a complacent drone even though you understand the issue.
kjkjadksj 1y ago
A lot of games don’t even support the notched resolution so you get business as usual. The ones that do let you chose this resolution as well.
tomkarho 1y ago
Suppose it comes down to psychology. I recall reading long time ago that rounded corners signal safety since they can't cut you so easily so we gravitate towards those shapes.

crazygringo 1y ago

Don't think of notches as something stupid that takes away from screen area. Think of them as something that allows the overall screen area to increase, as bevels shrink. And then when the corners of the screen are so close to the corner of the laptop, and the corner of the laptop is rounded, it looks weird if the corner of the screen isn't rounded. Like a square peg in a round hole. Fortunately, it's all context-dependent. So when you watch a video that is inherently rectangular on a Mac, that takes precedence. It's only shown below the notch, and the rounded corners on the bottom disappear. So it's kind of the best of all worlds. Bigger screen with round corners for actual work (the notch is not particularly objectionable in the menu bar), slightly smaller screen with rectangular corners for video (and games too I assume?).

ratmeadow 1y ago
Is bevel size really so important when it's already measured in mm? Personally I like a bit of bevel because I don't want the screen going to the edge of the device. The edge of the device is for holding, not interaction.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- crazygringo 1y ago
  No, screen size is important. For the same size laptop, less bevel means more screen. And I don't about you but I don't hold the screen half of my laptop. Not unless the laptop is closed. So I don't see how that's a concern.
  - pezezin 1y ago
    But a cell phone, maybe. For a laptop, we are talking about a couple of millimetres on each side max, it is not a big deal.
    - userbinator 1y ago
      ...and then the same "more space!!!111" people run apps which fill their screen with useless whitespace.
      - LtWorf 1y ago
        I mean… I would be very happy to whip designers in public but I think that's illegal.
  - mikestew 1y ago
    For the love of $DEITY, it’s bezel! :-) https://www.howtogeek.com/762611/what-is-a-bezel/ https://www.howtogeek.com/762611/what-is-a-bezel/
    - mcv 1y ago
      I've often wondered about that, because I often see them used interchangeably (and not just here). But you're absolutely right. Here's a random site I found that explains it: https://www.difference.wiki/bevel-vs-bezel/ https://www.difference.wiki/bevel-vs-bezel/ Is the similarity of the word the only reason they often get mixed up? I think another factor is that flat surfaces surrounded by an angled bevel are fairly common. For example. I just noticed that the bezel of one of my monitors is also beveled.
    - bregma 1y ago
      The bezel on my monitor has a bevel.
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      TIL. Thank you! Suddenly realizing I've had the words confused my whole life :S
eviks 1y ago
> then when the corners of the screen are so close to the corner of the laptop, and the corner of the laptop is rounded, it looks weird if the corner of the screen isn't rounded. The rounded laptop corners is a similar design decision. And also it doesn't look weird to me at all compared to rounded corners for windows, especially when they introduce visible desktop garbage in those now-not-perfectly-covering-rectangles corner areas
- Etheryte 1y ago
  Rounded corners are not simply an aesthetic design choice, they make the device more durable as there's less of a pinch point when you drop, snag or mishandle the device.
troupo 1y ago
The notch reduces the space available in the top menu bar. And since Apple is still incapable of creating a built-in Bartender-like functionality you end up with less space on screen. It's an actual objective fact of life. You don't get a larger 15"/16"/17" inch screen. You get a screen that size minus the notch because of a psychotic obsession with thinness. And then they struggle to compensate for that with barely working workarounds in software that don't cover even half of cases.
- monsieurbanana 1y ago
  I don't understand your logic unless you're implicitly saying the camera needs to go away, but then you should say so (so that I can properly disagree with you). The notch makes for a smaller menu bar but without the notch there would be no menu bar there, it would take the space underneath instead.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - troupo 1y ago
    > I don't understand your logic unless you're implicitly saying the camera needs to go away Yup. We never had camera before the notch. > The notch makes for a smaller menu bar but without the notch there would be no menu bar there Yup. Before the notch we neither had a menu bar that could comfortably fit most menu items even in professional apps, nor did we have a camera. BTW, you literally are saying "The notch makes for a smaller menu bar". Imagine if I wrote that as the first sentence in my comment, then there would be no misunderstanding
    - ylk 1y ago
      The screen is a 16:10 screen with some extra pixels added next to the notch. By default, the system uses a resolution of 1512x982 (14"), which you can change to 1512x945 (16:10) to move the menu bar below the notch and end up with black pixels next to the notch.
anonymoushn 1y ago
my menu icons are hiding behind the notch lol
incrudible 1y ago
First of all, you can not argue anyone out of thinking it looks stupid or ugly. That is a visceral subjective experience and the extra space or whatever does nothing to make up for it. Now for the bezels, mind that an equidistant circle (or squircle) radius converges to zero. So to avoid having a large inner radius, avoid a large outer radius. The Macbook is not a tablet, you do not hold its corners in your hand. However, at some point Apple must have decided that the squircle is its entire visual identity and that hard corners on the XY plane are bad. That creates design problems it would not otherwise have. The fact that developers are led into the trap of not pixel matching to the display however just shows a lack of attention to detail.
- jameshart 1y ago
  The bottom corners of a MacBook screen are not rounded. The top corners are because the corners of the case are rounded. The corners of the case are rounded because you need to be able to do things like slide it into a laptop bag.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    > The bottom corners of a MacBook screen are not rounded. They are on my M4 MBA. They're software-rounded rather than in the hardware. You can move the pointer over the lower rounded corners; you can't over the upper ones.
pdpi 1y ago
> Fortunately, it's all context-dependent. So when you watch a video that is inherently rectangular on a Mac, that takes precedence. It's only shown below the notch, and the rounded corners on the bottom disappear. Also, it's worth noting that notches are a hardware-specific. I haven't tried any of the MBAs with notches, but the MBPs have good-enough black levels that the notch just kind of vanishes into the black background when using full-screen apps.

bee_rider 1y ago

Are the screens OLED? The phones are... IMO the notch is pointless, but they need space for the front camera. With OLED they can just turn the pixels off when it suits the application and it becomes like a big bevel, which was the alternative anyway.

MBCook 1y ago
Expected in the next year or two on the pros, but not yet.
buildbot 1y ago
My M1 MacBook Pro turns off the display & backlight that would show the notch as needed, for example right now in full screen Safari you could not tell there is a notch/menu bar area at all. It's actually just as good as it can be already. Free extra space! Bezel not bevel FYI.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  The funny thing is, I had bezel initially, but saw so many instances of bevel here that I started to second-guess myself, haha.

bigstrat2003 1y ago

Nope. I think they're incredibly stupid as well.

jama211 1y ago
You realise you can use the largest rectangular section of the screen as a rectangular screen right? Play a video and you’ll see. It’s the best of both worlds

dlivingston 1y ago

I've got a MacBook with a notch and I literally never notice it. That's a common sentiment among MacBook users, btw -- I very rarely seeing people complain about the notch. I'm sure there are some, but seems to be a minority.

bombcar 1y ago
You didn’t lose pixels to the notch, you gained pixels beside it!
bbrks 1y ago
I frequently notice when my menubar items overflow and get truncated behind the notch with no built-in way to actually see them! You have to hoop jump with janky tools[1] that actually let you see and access the icons silently hidden because they overshot the notch. [1] https://macmenubar.com/menu-bar-managers/ https://macmenubar.com/menu-bar-managers/
- MeneDev 1y ago
  I think nothing shows more that Apple has lost it’s eye for detail and good designs than the icons disappearing behind the notch.
- jameshart 1y ago
  This has to be a vast gulf in terms of usage patterns for different users - I’ve managed at times to get up to six icons in my menu bar; what are you doing that fills up half the screen?

userbinator 1y ago

I've always preferred the look of non-antialiased fonts on an LCD for this reason - you can finally actually see the sharp square corners of a pixel, yet somehow many like the blurry smoothness of antialiasing to make the screen more like a CRT.

userbinator 1y ago
Please explain why you disagree?
- bowsamic 1y ago
  People obviously think your comment is sarcastic
Findecanor 1y ago
I prefer text to be hinted and antialiased even in low resolutions on a CRT. The first time I saw this on BeOS in the 90s I thought it was a big step up. You get corners snapped to pixels without jagged lines in-between. However, hinting makes text wider or narrower depending on font size and resolution. Apple chose not to have hinting so as to make the text more dimensionally accurate. That did look blurry ... so Apple then doubled the screen resolution.

AceJohnny2 1y ago

It goes deep. obligatory: https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html

jeffhuys 1y ago

Menu bar is on top on mac. I see it as the top bevel becoming a screen, not taking away from any screen real estate, actually FREEING up space for apps. I never see the notch anyway because my wallpaper is black.

trinix912 1y ago
Until you want to do something full screen, then it might be a glaring black rectangle on top of the screen. The way to do it properly is to hide the camera in the thin bezels or somewhere else (inside the LCD, are we there yet?). This is just a lazy solution that designers probably even thought seems iconic.
- msh 1y ago
  But if you hide it in a small bezel or behind the LCD you will get significantly worse camera quality.
  - jeffhuys 1y ago
    The quality is already insane if you think about how thin it has to be, with "glass" in front of it and the alu behind it. Pinch it with your fingers, imagine a CAMERA being thinner than that... I feel like the only one that's still amazed by tech sometimes. I still look at planes and feel amazed we puny humans did that. It's never good enough.
- jeffhuys 1y ago
  I get what you mean, but to me it just looks like before there was a notch, like there's no screen there. I can't really tell where the bezel ends and the screen starts if it's all black. Just looks like a large bezel. Guess it's just a matter of taste. I'm never bothered by it.
- lilyball 1y ago
  Full screen stuff isn't supposed to go behind the notch, unless they opt in to supporting it. By default, fullscreen stuff just gets the notchless 16:10 area under the menubar, and the menubar area goes black, so the notch becomes invisible and nothing is "glaring", it just looks like the top bezel of the screen is larger.

floppyd 1y ago

I don't have a notched laptop screen, but I do like rounded corners, makes screens feel just a little bit more natural. My MacBook is older and doesn't have rounded corners, but I got used to them so much that I ended up simulating them in software.

pezezin 1y ago
More natural why? Paper doesn't (usually) have rounded corners and it looks pretty natural to me.

gwd 1y ago

Look, given current technology there are exactly three options: 1. Don't have a front-facing camera on your laptop. Your actual laptop screen can be as close to the edge of the laptop case as technology will allow, with no bevel. 2. Have a front-facing camera on your laptop, with no bevel. Your actual laptop screen is now square, but has to be 5mm shorter now. There's a 5mm strip at the top of your laptop that can't be used for anything. 3. Have a front-facing camera on your laptop, with a bevel. Now the actual laptop screen has a "dead space" in middle at the top, but can again be as close to the edge of the laptop case as technology will allow. There's a narrow strip at the top that can't be used for anything, but the area to the left and right of the bevel can. (A number 4 would be to somehow have a front-facing camera that operates without needing to displace screen area. Not clear how this would work without some complicated mechanism to extend the camera out the top of the screen, which would come with its own problems.) Now, the vast majority of the time, you're going to be using your Mac in a windowed environment, with menus on the left, indicators on the right, and absolutely nothing in the middle. In the case of #2, this menu bar has to take real estate from the top of your shorter screen, meaning that your windows are all 5mm shorter. #3 allows the menu bar and indicators to take up that space which on #2 is completely dead, freeing up extra space for your actual applications. And the key thing is this: For modern full-screen games, in #3, you (apparently) can't use the areas to the side of the bezel; but this is the same situation you're in in #2. IOW, as another commenter has said: The bevel design doesn't take away screen in the middle; it adds screen space on the side of the bevel. That said, the API here seems obviously mad: What's the point of giving you a resolution if it's going to silently resize it behind your back? It should either give you the resolution which it won't resize, or throw an error when you try to make one higher.

dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
While I agree in general with your comment, a small nitpick on this: > There's a 5mm strip at the top of your laptop that can't be used for anything. Well, it can - on mine I have a physical switch that allows me to block the lens, and it saved me a few times. (I just wish I had a similar one for the microphone.)
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julik 1y ago

No, you are not the only one

simondotau 1y ago

For what it's worth, Macintosh had rounded corners since its inception in 1984. They were just bitmaps in the screen corners and still addressable by software (and even by the mouse cursor in any context) but this demonstrates an aesthetic heritage. These software rounded corners disappeared in software when CRTs gave way to flat panels, but they are indisputably part of the Apple design aesthetic.

righthand 1y ago

Nope. I’m right there with you. I can’t even use my laptop undocked because half my applications use the toolbar to store their icon. So I have to plug my laptop into my monitor just to see what is in my screen space. I have no idea why people praise these laptops, for a cpu I guess. Their design is a joke and feels like a Playskool laptop toy. At least when the old Apple forced “phablets” as the standard phone size they included a software work around for reaching the top of the screen. Not adding a dropdown menu for the toolbar is brain dead.

mthoms 1y ago
Yeah, it's annoying. Try: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar https://www.macbartender.com https://www.macbartender.com I think there's a native solution (finally) coming in the next MacOS.
- righthand 1y ago
  I’m not trying anything because it should have been implemented before launch natively. Not years after as part of some Product manager promotion cycle. Not installing a fix is how Apple wants me to use my machine by default in a broken state.
  - mthoms 1y ago
    In the time it took you to write your comments on this issue, you could have just fixed the problem. It's a valid complaint, don't get me wrong... but insisting on not fixing it as some sort of moral stance is only hurting yourself. People are weird, man.
    - righthand 1y ago
      I mostly work attached to a monitor. I will continue to work how I like, I don’t own a Macbook outside of work. I will continue not installing custom untrusted software just because a bunch of “fans” online told me to do it. I will continue complaining about it. All of that BECAUSE I enjoy the entropy it causes more than actually using the piece of garbage laptop. I can do a lot of things instead of write that comment. And installing work arounds for a trillion dollar company with an attitude problem is not one of them. Give attitude, get attitude. What’s weird is being a complacent drone even though you understand the issue.

kjkjadksj 1y ago

A lot of games don’t even support the notched resolution so you get business as usual. The ones that do let you chose this resolution as well.

tomkarho 1y ago

Suppose it comes down to psychology. I recall reading long time ago that rounded corners signal safety since they can't cut you so easily so we gravitate towards those shapes.