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The video is ridiculous however it is a legitimate concern. The good news is that this is easily fixable with software.
 
Sure. But the notch aggrevates the problem by leaving less space in the menu bar.
As does a smaller screen size, though. Both MBPs still have more menu bar space than a 13 inch, never mind the 12 inch MacBook.

Apps should be mindful of the size of their main menu. And Apple should have better icon management (like Bartender). The notch doesn't really change much about it, it was already true.
 
But not as excited as the Youtube reviewers who unbox this product as if they are unboxing a treasure map. Who was the Apple flunkie telling us the notch was some sort of gift to the consumers? That sounded as believable as Zuckerberg decrying, "if we didn't care about fixing the nutbag conspiracy theories that spreads through our site like water, we wouldn't be researching the problem".

By having the notch, the computer gets to have a significantly bigger screen without making the MacBook body bigger.

Without the notch, you'd still have massive bezels and a 13" screen instead of a 14" one.

Having a notch is not ideal, but given the two alternatives, it's a pretty easy choice.
 
How obnoxious can this guy get, I mean yeah sure it's a valid concern if you have a crowded menu bar but it's not as though it wasn't a problem before the notch. If you run out of space it's going to start hiding some of your menu icons. It's also early days, a tiny software update could fix this so easily.
 
However obnoxious this guy is, it's clear the behavior has not been properly tested with popular apps. It's not consistent in the examples provided in these videos. No UI element should ever be allowed to go behind the notch - period!

So it very much is Apples fault to bring this lacklustre thing to the MBP. How difficult can it be to force ALL apps to display anything only outside of the notch? Apple always touts how much control it has over its ecosystem and how beneficial that is. Well then use that power to solve this problem.
 
The notch is so 80’s. And it looks also terrible on the iPhone and now on the mbp. I hope it want come to the iPads. Please don’t do it. It’s a show off. A price of bad design and construction.

No notch is obviously going to look better. As soon as we somehow manage to bend the laws of physics and have the camera, face-ID etc under the display and still work just as god as if it wasn't under the screen it all becomes a game of pros vs cons.

Obviously, Apple could simply decide to have a beezle instead of the notch. But how is that beneficial to anyone? So you make the 14-inch into 13-inch, the 16-inch into a 15-inch just because you can't handle a notch in the middle of the screen? You get more screen relaste when having the notch with the only con being that it looks silly and the fact that you can't have anything at the top in the middle of the display where the notch is.

How is this any worse than simply losing the entire screen space at the top of the display?
 
His overly excited reaction is because Apple should have this known before the release of it and its a little crazy it wasn't written into the new systems.
Its one of literally the first things people think about when seeing the menu bar and icons on it. It should of been Implemented very far back in design but nope. Who's working for Apple to not see common sense?
 
There should be a way to fix it at system level,because expecting every single app’s developer to make an update for it isn’t realistic.
My understanding is, the system puts a checkbox in Get Info for every app, that one can check to make that app entirely ignore the 74px top stripe and run in the lower 16:10 section, just like it would have in previous versions of the OS. Spend five minutes after unboxing and try out your various apps, and check the box on the ones that don't play well with others (or don't play well yet). Done. Without posting videos of yourself cackling and being outraged. He seems extremely pleased with himself to be able to point how how terrible this situation is - clearly Apple doesn't know how to design devices as well as he does. Me, I would have checked before ordering to understand how things work and what workarounds there might be for incompatibilities (come to think of it, that is what I did).

Heard a cogent argument from John Siracusa that having the menu bar go up into the top area by default (vs. being able to turn off the top area with a system-wide preference and maybe asking the user to check/uncheck that preference upon setup), was the right way to go, because many people will stop noticing it quite quickly (after being annoyed initially) and then they'll have more room on the screen from then on, where, if you gave them an option to turn off the extra screen space, they'd flip that switch right away, to feel comfortable with the old way, and then never reconsider the choice after, thus ending up permanently with less screen space. I thought it was a fair point. Essentially Apple is giving you "bonus pixels", space up above the normal 16:10 screen, and people are getting enraged, feeling that something has been taken away from them. It still reminds me of when widescreen movies in the home first became a thing and people got all upset about black bars on their screen, certain that they were being deprived of part of the picture by cruel directors.

A big part of the problem is, Apple can't say, "hey, developers, we're going to do this new thing with the menubar in future Macs so fix your software now", without giving away parts of the design of their future models, which they are highly reluctant to do. In fact, they sometimes do throw major hints (like before they went to different iPhone screen sizes, and retina screens, there were WWDC sessions where they urged developers, "you really ought to use these layout tools, instead of just drawing things at fixed locations"), but those hints often get ignored (I heard a mention of there being one demo this past WWDC where they showed a non-functional Apple logo in the middle of the menubar, and talked about apps needing to work around it - haven't looked into the story behind that yet, but it could have been trying to prep developers for this "notch").

It feels sometimes like these bits get ignored by developers because they don't have an immediate need for the feature, instead of them going, "well, they're bringing this up, they're highlighting it, maybe I should look into it". Like if they knew that part would dovetail with new hardware, then they'd pay attention but otherwise they blow it off. Kind of reminds me of the kids who ask the teacher, "is this going to be on the test?"
 
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I think there's a legitimate criticism that macOS still doesn't handle overflow well (it simply starts removing status items until all menus fit), and the notch does mean that the menu bar loses ~150 horizontal pixels.

I don't think Quinn does a good job enunciating that, though.

(Yes, Bartender exists. I think it's time for a first-party solution.)
 
For me the concept of a fixed menu bar on top of the screen is very outdated.
It was fine in the 90s when System 7 Macs were not capable of multitasking. But since OSX it simply is a relict of the past.
 
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In fact, they sometimes do throw major hints (like before they went to different iPhone screen sizes, and retina screens, there were WWDC sessions where they urged developers, "you really ought to use these layout tools, instead of just drawing things at fixed locations"), but those hints often get ignored (I heard a mention of there being one demo this past WWDC where they showed a non-functional Apple logo in the middle of the menubar, and talked about apps needing to work around it - haven't looked into the story behind that yet, but it could have been trying to prep developers for this "notch").

It feels sometimes like these bits get ignored by developers because they don't have an immediate need for the feature, instead of them going, "well, they're bringing this up, they're highlighting it, maybe I should look into it". Like if they knew that part would dovetail with new hardware, then they'd pay attention but otherwise they blow it off. Kind of reminds me of the kids who ask the teacher, "is this going to be on the test?"

In this case, the notion that the macOS screen was going to get a safe area (as iOS had before) wasn't known until it leaked days before the announcement. There was no API announcement at WWDC.

It is a bit of a conundrum that the out-of-the-box experience suffers, especially for the early adopters whom Apple should be courting to a degree.
 
Why didn’t Apple incorporated an App compatibility mode?

Basically pushing the menu bar just under the notch that hides and filling above it with black space.

It could of been an option by right clicking the app and have an option for compatibility mode before launching. That would let app developers catch up in the meantime and allowed for apps to be usable that will never get updates.
 
I said this when the introduced the notch into iPhone. A notch is not a feature. It all comes down to inability to miniaturise the components enough to fit into a narrow bezel or make them work under the screen. People need to stop making excuses for notches. They are ugly and anything that breaks the clean lines around your display will be annoying. Having this on a Pro level machine is not super annoying AND you don't even get FACE ID. I will find myself trying to hide it all the time. And no one can answer this either. Why could they not use the exact same notch components from an iPhone. Im looking at mine now. It goes right up against the top off the phone front. If it was that size on a MacBook it would fit into a super narrow bezel. I don't get why it has to be so big and still only have cameras, mic and True Tone sensor.
 
This just shows how little software is tested nowadays, should have been spotted and fixed in no time.
 
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For me the concept of a fixed menu bar on top of the screen is very outdated.
It was fine in the 90s when System 7 Macs were not capable of multitasking. But since MacOS it simply is a relict of the past.

I beg to differ. The concept that no matter what (fullscreen mode aside), there's always a bar at the top that gives you system-wide functions (Apple menu), then app-wide functions (e.g., Preferences and Quit), then more specific app functionality, and finally system-wide status (menu extras / status items)? I think that's great UI.
 
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