At its ‘Unleashed’ special event last week, Apple unveiled its new 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pro models with next-generation M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. Fortunately, the new Macbook Pro models appear to be the most a MacBook has ever been geared towards professionals. Unfortunately, both have a display notch.
Unsurprisingly, Apple has caught a lot of flak since the announcement for adding a disruptive notch to the otherwise captivating, high refresh rate screen of the new MacBook Pro models when they listened to their users for a change and got everything else right — from I/O to full-sized Function keys and removing the Touch Bar.
During an interview on a recent episode of the Same Brain podcast with iJustine and Jenna Ezarik, Shruti Haldea, a product manager for the Mac line at Apple and one of the presenters of last week’s ‘Unleashed’ Apple event, called the MacBook Pro notch a “smart way” to give customers more usable screen real estate while also thinning down the bezels (via MacRumors).
What we’ve done is we’ve actually made the display taller. Like on the 16-inch notebook, you still have a 16.0 active area on the diagonal in that 16:10-inch window, and we just grew the display up from there and put the menu bar up there. We just kind of moved it up and out of the way. So it’s a really smart way to give you more space for your content, and when you’re in full-screen mode, you have that 16:10 window, and it looks great. It’s seamless.
Specifically, because Apple added a notch to the display, the bezels on the new MacBook Pro models measure just 3.5mm on each side, making them 24% thinner on the left and right sides compared to previous generations, and a whopping 60% thinner on the top and bottom.
Apple is banking on the trade-off being worth it for users. The notch does not interfere with full-screen content, as macOS blacks out the top menu bar in full-screen mode. The Dark Mode baked into macOS also makes the notch less noticeable.
In addition, third-party developers are already piping out apps like Forehead, which is designed specifically to hide the display notch.
Click here to order your 14-inch or 16-inch MacBook Pro today — both models start shipping October 26, 2021.
