Apple botched the notch on the MacBook Pros by leaving out Face ID; the bezels are smaller but not ultrathin like on Dell and HP rivals
All the downsides of the notch, without the Face ID benefits — The day that many have been dreading has finally arrived. Apple has added a notch to its new MacBook Pros.
The VergeChaim Gartenberg
Context & Ripple Effects
The MacBook Pro notch is the second time Apple has shipped a display cutout whose original purpose was housing Face ID hardware — the first was the iPhone X's notch, which drew criticism for photo, video, and game-viewing quirks even when the sensor array justified its existence. The Pixel 3 XL already showed how this plays out without the tech: reviewers treated Google's tall cutout and chin bezel as pure cost of copying an aesthetic rather than buying into a capability.
The timing stings because it lands one day after coverage arguing the same laptops show Apple finally listening to pro users on the Touch Bar and ports. And Apple has a working counterexample in-house — the 2018 iPad Pro was slated for thin bezels with no notch while still supporting Face ID in both orientations — making the Mac's choice harder to defend on engineering grounds.
First-order effects
Buyers of the new MacBook Pros inherit the iPhone X's menu-bar and media-viewing compromises without the Face ID unlock-and-authenticate payoff that justified them on the phone.
Dell and HP gain a concrete talking point: Apple's bezels are smaller than before but visibly thicker than rival Windows flagships, undercutting the premium-industrial-design claim.
Second-order effects
Windows OEMs can run the Pixel 3 XL playbook against Apple — framing the notch as borrowed aesthetics minus the underlying tech, which is precisely the critique that dogged Google's tall cutout in 2018.
Apple's own pro-user feedback loop gets a new pressure point: if the company reversed course on the Touch Bar and ports after pushback, the same constituency now has a visible daily reminder of a feature they never asked for.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, Apple's industrial design language will keep migrating across product lines ahead of — or without — the hardware that originally motivated it, forcing every future laptop review to weigh design coherence against function on a case-by-case basis.
Face ID's absence from the Mac keeps authentication fragmented across Apple's lineup, leaving room for biometric login standards from PC makers to define expectations Apple then has to answer to.
The trend: Hardware design language is propagating across device categories faster than the enabling components do, turning signature elements like the notch into brand signals that competitors can attack as form without function.
(1/6) Are you a designer/developer curious about how your app's menu bar will behave on those shiny new MacBook Pros? We've got some updated guidance! Human Interface Guidelines: https://developer.apple.com/ ... https://developer.apple.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
As you evaluate your opinion on the MacBook Pro's notch, keep in mind that it houses more than just a 1080p camera. It also houses the TrueTone sensor (colors consistent in all lighting conditions), light sensor (adjusts brightness/keyboard illumination), and “camera on” LED. htt…
When Apple goes OLED in a few years on the MacBook, then they could put the Face ID IR sensors under the panel and just have a hole punch or put the camera underneath as well. Easier on notebooks than smartphones due to the lower resolution...
@HitokiriEric This laptop is literally everything The Verge has been bitching it wanted from an Apple laptop for years, and much more, and they still found something to stand on a high horse and bitch about. Incredible.
Face ID sucks, it's not secure for anyone who is even a little bit vulnerable to law enforcement targeting, and you shouldn't use it so you should be happy that it's not on the new Mac. Good talk? Good talk.