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I got the 24" iMac with light bezels and frankly I forget they're there because I'm looking at what's on the screen instead of fixating on the space around it.

The g-d notch though, intrudes on the screen and looks like it's gonna be pretty hard to ignore, especially on a smaller display. I was just using Numbers and noticed on my M1 Air that the menus reach right to the middle. So, I guess they're going to edit down the menus on apps now? And how will older software react to this? Maybe I'll be wrong, but it seems like it stirs up a bunch of UI **** for basically no good reason other than "people are now offended by a strip of metal/glass along the top of the display."

There's a number of popular apps with menu choices that roll to and through the middle.

My guess is that the menus that would be "cut" by the notch will shift to the right of the notch. It won't make sense to "bite off" a portion of a menu and/or have an entire menu name behind the notch. I'm thinking if a menu is in that territory, macOS wouldn't shift down the menu bar so that it is just below the notch. So my guess is it will simply split menus with that many sections. Of course, how many menus could be right of notch before starting to bump into icons in the menu strip on that end of the screen? 1? 2?

Else, maybe MacOS menus will do the responsive website thing and if menu collides with notch in normal mode it switches to the 3 horizontal lines vertical menu approach? I can't quite imagine it going there but I didn't expect a notch in a MBpro either... especially after getting an iPad Mini with what seems to be a pretty slim top bezel with 1080p FaceTime camera in that notch-less bezel.
 
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White bezels are terrible. No way Apple put both a notch and white bezels in the next MBA
the same leaker that uncovered the notch for this year's mbp 6 month's prior already indicated that the mba will have a notch as well
 
I’d bet pretty hard against a M2 chip in 2022. iMac & Mac Pro will be new, probably at WWDC, so why open the door to new chip that make pro machines, which are on a longer upgrade cycle, look out-of-date or a pending update.

My guess is we see an updated M1 chip in the 2021 MBA. Maybe 2 more cores or more GPUs. Less than the pro, more than 2021. The driver for upgrades will be all the other features and look and feel. Color makes sense since this is a consumer machine and consumers care more about how it looks vs how many GPUs a chip has—when most don’t know what a GPU is.

But, I may be wrong. Apple does upgrade the A series every year. But this has to run its course at some point. These devices all have more headroom than software can utilize right now.
 
Right now, Apple Design is a double-edged sword. No way Johnny Ive would've let a MacBook have a notch on the screen, but on the flip side, the new MBPs have more pro features. Pick your poison
? the iphone X (which has a notch) was developed during Ive's tenure at Apple. Under Johnny you would've seen a notch and less ports :apple:
 
Yeah makes sense after the iMac redesign, I'm curious to see the M2 chip.

Not having Promotion makes sense, this is going to be a consumer level device so they wanna cut costs wherever they can.

Glad to hear about the 1080p camera! Can't wait to see the final design.
 
I haven’t had my M1 MBA for all that long and I’m really quite happy with it - but the color options and the new chip would be tempting. Especially, because the new pro models are really not for me. I like them, but I don’t want to spend all that money on a lot of power that I don’t need for what I do with my laptop.

As for (off-)white bezels… any pre-2018 MBA kinda had those, no?
 
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I've been hoping for something like an update of that old 12" Retina MacBook, but with Apple Silicon and a good keyboard this time.
I predict they will simply call this new “Air” the MacBook. And they will release a new version of my beloved 12” MacBook and call that the MacBook Air— which it should have been named in the first place as it’s the lightest and thinnest laptop they’ve ever produced.
 
I don’t expect a notch… why? Because of the white bezels… that in itself will firstly look awful as a notch design and secondly provides enough brand recognition for apple as they are.
"Looking awful" is probably the main reason why I am expecting a white notch, because honestly, only Apple could get away with something like that. Hopefully "off-white" means it can at least blend in better with a light theme menu bar.

Alternatively, I would less expect a white or off-white colour simply because the iPads don't have white options, and those are the closest thing to a consumer portable Mac without the actual "book" part. But I think the notch itself is a given at this point...
 
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We, the knights of the little notch, want our notch. And we want it now.

Wow, I wonder how the Air will be. It will be a different machine than the original first edition. ;)
 
Right now, Apple Design is a double-edged sword. No way Johnny Ive would've let a MacBook have a notch on the screen, but on the flip side, the new MBPs have more pro features. Pick your poison

"More pro features" wouldn't require the notch. Again, the new Apple iPad Mini 6 has a 1080p FaceTime camera in a very thin, notchless bezel. I'm assuming the MBpros bezel is not quite a "thick(?)" as iPad Mini 6, but even if they are half the thickness, adding the few millimeters to the the bezel would yield a notch-less MBPro with every one of the same pro features... and the 1080p camera... if Apple had wanted it.

If that would be impossible to add those millimeters to do that, make the case ever-so slightly longer to accommodate those few extra millimeters. Best I can tell from comparing mini 6 to a prior MBPro is that- worst case- might add 10-12mm to the height of the case if the bezel at the top and bottom of the screen had to be identical. For notch-less MBpro, would any of us care if MBPro was just a little bit "longer" (case)? Even if 12mm was necessary, it would still fit the same bags, cases, etc. That's barely over 1cm more case.
 
Black notch? I could attempt to hide it in the menu bar. Dark mode exists.

White notch? That's gonna be a no from me, dawg.

I'm so glad I bought a 16GB/1TB Macbook Air this year. I'm gonna keep it for a loooong time.
 
I've seen it said that the M1 MBA will remain in the lineup for $999 whereas the new M2 MBA will be $1299.

I just wonder what they'll do with the 13MBP. Surely they'll get rid of it.
 
No one is going to buy this for hardcore video editing sessions.
That’s also not what the Air is meant for.
The fact that they have a Pro laptop in their lineup kinda hints at that. So yeah, like you said, more casual users.

I feel like they’re taking it back to that neat distinction between pro and consumer like back in the day of the colorful CRT iMac and iBook.
 
The lack of ProMotion support on any of the cheaper Macs is a real letdown. I don't need all the fancy (and seriously expensive) CPU and GPU horsepower in the new MacBook Pros.

My workflow is text-based. I just want a quiet machine with a big screen and a high refresh rate, so I can scroll through text for hours without having to be docked to a high-refresh external monitor or wanting to puke myself inside out.

What a bummer.
 
Well there’s white bezels on the iMac, and notches on the MacBook Pros… So why couldn’t there be white notches on the Airs?
The camera lens and hardware would be super obvious and glaring in a white notch.

Edit: Also, think about how horrendous it would look if you were watching a video in full screen, with black bars above and below the video.
 
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