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.
If you want to avoid the extra space, it's as easy as using a 16:10 resolution size. The menubar will drop down to the 16:10 space.
To change it you have to first display the hidden list by enabling a “display resolutions list” toggle.
That is not something a “I love Apple because it just works” person can figure out.
Personally, I've never run out of space in my menu bar, So the notch gives me 1cm of extra screen space.
It's nothing to do with thinness. It's about packing the largest possible display into the laptop's width/height. Sure, you could argue to just make the laptop 1cm higher for that bezel, but then why not add a notch and get 2cm of extra screen height?
That perceived 1cm is largely meaningless for content. And you get less space in the top menu bar.
> Personally, I've never run out of space in my menu bar
I have 27 icons in my menu bar. Not because I collect them, but because quite a few apps add their icons there and I use a few of them.
On the laptop screen it manages to show 10.
IntelliJ idea has 12 top-level menus (I swear they had more). On a laptop the top menu bar manages to show 10 items on the left of the notch, and has to move two more to the right. This both splits the menu for no reason, and reduces the space for icons even further.
The notch has been around for 4 years now, and Apple still hasn't provided a solution for the problem they introduced.
And, of course, when you want to truly take advantage of "more content" you can't because the "safe screen space" without the notch is still squarely below the notch, and apps have to to be very careful to actually use that, or the notch will get in the way.
> It's nothing to do with thinness.
Yes, it does. In this case with thinness of bezels.
> Sure, you could argue to just make the laptop 1cm higher for that bezel
Yes, you could do that if you didn't have an institutional psychosis about thinness everywhere.
As a lot of people told you, you can just disable it. I've been doing that for 4 years, just set your resolution to a 16:10 ratio and you're good to go. The resolution is exactly the same as it was before they introduced the notch
Personally I like the fact that Apple gives us the choice. I dislike the notch and prefer my menu bar below because I use apps like intellij. My wife likes the notch and keeps it. So, both of us can have what we want.
Maybe Apple could have made it slightly easier to disable it by having an option instead of choosing a 16:10 resolution but, to be honest, most of the people who dislike it tend to be power users who can figure it out.
It's actually optional, the functionality is built into Mac OS (just check "show all resolutions" in display setting and pick the notchless resolution). You get that bezel you want, along with the full menu bar.
> Yes, it does. In this case with thinness of bezels.
Device thickness is not the same thing as bezel thinness. If you make a phone/laptop thinner, all you get is less battery life. If you make bezels thiner, you get more display area.
Luckily I have mostly used Macs on external screens the last few years. But it ticks me off every time I actually use a MacBook as a laptop.
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.
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
