The iPhone 14 Pro’s “Dynamic Island” is one of Apple’s most ingenious innovations in years
We thought we knew a lot about how the iPhone would shed the “notch,” but Apple managed to hold one big surprise for the event.
In my piece yesterday about Apple Watch Ultra, I lamented the fact that leaks and rumors often spoil the surprise of new product launches. Such things are unavoidable for me as someone who writes about Apple, and that’s why it’s so fun when Apple still manages to completely surprise me. Such was the case with the iPhone 14 Pro’s signature new feature: the Dynamic Island.
For context, due to the aforementioned leaks and rumors, we’ve known for a long time that Apple was planning to move away from the “notch” at the top of the display that every Face ID-equipped iPhone has had since the iPhone X debuted in 2017. Instead, the iPhone 14 Pro would have a pill-shaped cutout to house the camera and Face ID equipment. (Rumor purveyors were conflicted as to whether it would be a single cutout or two adjacent cutouts.) I wrote a piece last week summarizing the state of the speculation. In that piece I said the following:
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.
I had no idea how that marriage of hardware and software would come together. What we got was something incredibly cool, the embodiment of Apple’s “surprise and delight” formula. Apple is taking advantage of the fact that the actual hardware components blend in seamlessly with the software-imposed black pill shape. But they didn’t stop there. Otherwise this would be a Static Island. The pill-shaped island actually expands horizontally, and at times also vertically to create spaces where notifications and interactive controls can appear. Just look at the examples in this photo:
The Dynamic Island on the left iPhone is showing the battery status of connected AirPods. The one in the center is showing controls for answering or dismissing an incoming phone call, along with name and photo of the caller. The one on the right is showing a phone call’s elapsed time. Apple showed several permutations of what can be done with the Dynamic Island during Wednesday’s event, and third-party app developers will be able to utilize it.
Not only is the Dynamic Island a really fun and whimsical way to bring interactivity and variability to the way notifications can be displayed in iOS, but it’s also just insanely clever design. It’s one of the best cases I’ve ever seen where designers took a limitation and made it a strength. Ideally the camera and Face ID sensors could be hidden entirely behind the display, giving users an unbroken sheet of glass to interact with. Some Android phones have done this, but I suspect the quality level of the results is below Apple’s threshold of acceptability. So those items have to be designed around. The old notch was a reasonable way of making this affordance. The Dynamic Island takes this and creates a true signature feature out of an outright liability. It’s absolutely brilliant.
Ok, but what about the name? A friend sitting next to me at our Apple Event watch party groaned when Apple announced that the name of this feature is “Dynamic Island.” For him it’s cringe-inducing. It’s definitely stupid, but to me it’s whimsically stupid. I genuinely love it, and I love that Apple is leaning into it. Sometimes Apple gives names to features that you only really hear during Apple events. I’m not sure anyone’s going to remember “Photonic Engine.” But Apple is using the term Dynamic Island in its actual commercials, including putting it visually onscreen in large letters. (I just saw one of these commercials during Thursday Night Football as I was writing this.) People are going to actually know and use this term.
In my piece before the event, I said this about the rumored pill-shaped cutout:
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.
Now that we’ve seen just how much work Apple has put into the Dynamic Island, I’m even more convinced that this is true. This isn’t a situation where they created this for the iPhone 14 Pro, but next year’s model will have an entirely under-display solution. No, this is the kind of feature you build because you expect to use it for years. My guess is it’s with us for at least the next five years. Time will tell!