[Dave]

You are not wrong 😄

Some of the screenshots they showed during the event had the app’s menus (I think it was Xcode, but don’t hold me to that) continue on the right side of the notch, which is visually confusing and seems likely to make people forget about menus that get put on the right of the notch. There are three solutions (off the top of my head):
1) Skip the webcam: Probably not ideal in a “work from home” world, but staring at a typing-height screen eight hours a day is horrible for your neck so you should be using an external monitor anyway, which puts the laptop webcam in the wrong place, so you’ll probably need a dedicated webcam anyway.
2) Do a bump-out: Admittedly ugly if done carelessly, but I’ve seen them done well enough to meet what I’d consider reasonable aesthetic requirements.
3) Leave the top bezel at 9mm instead of shrinking it to 3.5mm (or whatever it is): This (or the bump-out) is probably my preferred solution. I suppose it’s possible that having such a big disparity between the side and top bezel thicknesses would’ve been weird, but then do we really need the side bezels to be so thin? I mean, you’ve gotta have room to touch the thing somewhere, and a thicker bezel would let them strength the display’s frame. I’m not aware of evidence that it’s particularly flimsy, but tougher is better when it comes to things that might get thwacked by people walking by or quickly reclining airplane seats or whatever.

This is the core of why I hate it so much. I think I can probably get used to having to look on both sides of the notch for menus (something that’d be far less confusing on Windows or Linux where the menus are typically attached to the window instead of the top of the screen where they belong), but it’s such an unnecessary compromise. It’s more form over function “just because we can”, except this time you can’t “fix” it with a dongle.

Edit: Oh! I forgot some stuff! WRT “learning to look on both sides of the notch”, how is that going it affect muscle memory for people who normally use an external monitor as their main display? They won’t even be able to settle into a routine since it’ll change depending on whether they’re at their desks.

The menu layout logic is one more bit of code that needs to be maintained, one more place for bugs to creep in. And what happens if/when Apple eventually figures out how to avoid the notch? How long will they keep supporting notched displays in newer OSs, and what happens when they finally drop it? Will these screens “lose” 80 pixels (or whatever it is) of height on that OS? Will menus get drawn “under” the notch and be inaccessible? Will that version of the OS just not run on laptops with notched displays? These complications are all just so avoidable!