AUGUST 2019 MACWORLD 39its official announcement this fall—Google
ensures that people will associate the
square design with itself rather than with
Apple. Acknowledging the leaks grants
legitimacy to discussions of the design for
larger outlets that usually avoid the sketchy
pronouncements of rumor sites, which in
turn equates into wider awareness. By the
time Apple finally announces its device, it’ll
be the one that looks like a copycat in the
eyes of some onlookers. With that in mind,
it’ll be interesting to see how this affects the
wider adoption of square camera bumps
(if it happens at all).
LOOKING FORWARD
Maybe there’s some truth to the
speculation that Oppo and Xiaomi’s
transparent displays spell the end of the
notch—although they
almost certainly won’t
allow for the kind of
tech we find in Face
ID. Maybe Apple itself
will develop a solution,
or maybe everyone
will just go back to
large bezels. It’s hard
to tell right now.
It’s not hard to tell,
though, that Apple
proved that an initially
repulsive design
concept can feel
relatively ordinary in normal use when
careful attention is given to the design. It
proved you could pack a lot of sensors
into the front of a smartphone while still
giving users almost full run of the rest of a
device’s front-facing real estate. For the
number of sensors it provides, it remains
one of the most elegant implementations
of a notch to date. Some phones have
notches that arguably look better than
the iPhone’s—such as the OnePlus 6T
(go.macworld.com/6t1p)—but they don’t
come with the same features.
The notch isn’t an ideal design
element, but nothing yet comes closer to
achieving the dream of a fully featured
phone with almost a full-screen display.
For the moment, at least, every alternative
feels like a bigger compromise. ■Looks familiar.