The iPhone 14 Pro is rumored to move away from the notch. Here’s what that is likely to look like.
It’s long been rumored that the iPhone 14 Pro will move away from the “notch” design that the iPhone has had since the iPhone X debuted in 2017 in favor of a “hole punch” design in which the display wraps around the camera and sensors. Many of the early rumors suggested that these would be two separate areas near the top of the iPhone’s display, but late-breaking rumors suggest that Apple will handle this quite differently. Here’s Tim Hardwick, writing for MacRumors:
“According to information provided to MacRumors by an anonymous tipster, the discrete pill and hole cutouts are not visually separated when the display is powered on, but in fact appear as one contiguous, longer pill shape.
Rather than stick with the uneven aesthetic, the suggestion is that Apple has chosen to turn off the pixels in the "dead space" between the cutouts in order to create the appearance of a unified pill shape that is less distracting when viewing content on the screen.”
I’ve included a mockup above of what this could look like as envisioned by Parker Ortolani, who frequently creates mockups of rumored or desired future Apple software changes.
For further context, here’s why the notch has been Apple’s solution so far:
This is an older image, so Apple may have combined some of these sensors since this graphic was created, and they’ve likely been able to think the size of some of these components. They’ve also moved the speaker up into the bezel above the notch. But this graphic does help illustrate just how many sensors have to be accommodated somehow. Obviously in an ideal world the camera and these sensors would be able to hide behind the display, giving users an unbroken pane of glass on which to interact. Android phone makers have been experimenting with hiding these things behind the display for sometime, but I suspect the tradeoffs are currently too high to meet Apple’s standards. That suits me just fine, and the notch has never bothered me.
Based on the current state of rumors ahead of this event, it sounds like only the Pro models will get the new display and sensors design, whereas the non-Pro iPhones will still have the notch. That nicely keeps costs down on the lower-end models while helping Apple give customers a reason to spring for the iPhone 14 Pro. I suspect that the next few generations of iPhone Pro will all have this new “lozenge” design, and the down-market iPhone models will eventually adopt it as well.
Will this be an improvement over the notch? I think the devil will be in the details of how Apple handles this new hardware design with software. It’s probably not going to radically change third-party app design all that much. For example, if you’re a game designer you probably can’t do much differently since you will still have a sizable “dead area” to design around in your app. But I think visually it feels like a step forward, so in that less tangible way it’s a great improvement.
I look forward to finding out next week if the rumors are true, and if so how exactly Apple’s implementation lines up with all of the rumors and speculation. We’re not very “far out” now from finding out!