Literally during the latest iPhone announcement where Apple was even timid about showing off the front of the display or talking about the smaller notch, as everyone mocked how dated the notch looked.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/apple-makes-the-ipho...

Again, not saying this is nothing or that I love it, only that the buying public does not seem to feel anywhere near as strongly about it and I've never heard anyone complaining about it on a regular basis. Most people get used to it, if they're curious they probably understand that it's for the camera, and get on with life. I'd be quite surprised if this did not follow a very similar trajectory — especially since the display is larger so you could black out the entire top of the screen in software and still have more screen real estate than the previous model.

In this case, the 16" screen gained ~0.2" diagonally and 314px extra resolution. Those extra pixels mean that even with the notch you're going to see more on the screen than you could before and in my experience that's far more likely to be the part which shapes people's impression of a new device.

10 people complaining online doesn’t mean that all the millions of purchasers dislike it too.

That doesn’t mean it’s zero but it suggests that the compromise was actually quite reasonable, even if there are a small number of people who vocally disagree.

The Mac notch is right in the middle of the toolbar. I have lots of applications that use that space for menus and will be curious how cumbersome it will be now that we need to literally navigate around it.

Will we need to move the mouse down to get around the notch, or will the cursor be allowed to go under the notch?

From the full-screen screenshots, it appears that it's simply black across the top of the screen unless the application has been designed to support it. That looked like the regular Safari developer tools with an unbroken bar slightly lower down in the video.

I think for me it'll fade away, especially with a dark-mode UI.

Laptops are effectively always in landscape.

And yes, sarcasm.

The screenshots showing application menus almost hitting the notch are ugly af. I'm sure that there are applications that have even more menus than Photoshop or Premiere.

… and yet, sales have continued to be extremely high, which suggests that is a self-selected group of extremely vocal opponents rather than a real market trend.

I hate the notch, but I'll still buy iPhones all day long if my only other choice is to buy products with questionable privacy from an advertising company versus dealing with Apple's shitty designs.

They could have just moved everything down for IMO a slightly better design.

Some people run applications full screen most of the time. For example the browser, text editor, chat, etc.

I wonder if it automatically inserts a black bar in those situations.

Looking at the product photos it looks like they black-bar the entire top of the display when anything is full-screen? So that seems to make the notch even more intrusive as you lose out on all the screen real-estate next to it when something is fullscreen.

Or rather, the menu bar is now a permanent bezel that nothing else can occupy?

That would have been bezel in a notchless design.

Just see literally any other laptop that has both a fairly small bezel and fits a webcam in it, like the Dell XPS 13. The camera in the macbook may be better and require a larger lens assembly as a result, but it's surely not as big as the bezel + notch itself requires.