Apple is great at a whole bunch of things. Getting copied by competitors is one of them, a pattern that often wins honors such as “trend-setter” or “trailblazer.” Everything from Apple’s hardware choices to software design is copied, and often, quite brazenly.
Even the controversial shifts have been aped by rivals. Just take a look at the Liquid Glass design, and how Android brands (cough… Honor… cough) are now getting boldly “inspired” by it.
Occasionally, Apple’s choices have even set a bad precedent, like the decision to yank accessories from a phone’s box, ditching the headphone jack, big camera bumps, sealed laptop designs, and proprietary ports. But one design choice that was never replicated at scale was the display notch.
According to Bloomberg, Apple’s next MacBook Pro overhaul will ditch the boat-shaped notch that it introduced back in 2021 atop an updated design template for its laptops. And I am glad this trend was not copied by rivals in the Windows ecosystem.
The big shift
Just to be clear here, Apple is only ditching the notch, but the front camera remains in its place. “For the revamped MacBook Pro, Apple is retiring the “notch” — the cutout at the top of the screen that houses the camera. In its place, the company will adopt a so-called hole-punch design that leaves a display area around the sensor,” reports Bloomberg.
Simply put, the laptop will feature a floating lens design. Think of it as a dot floating in a sea of pixels. The design has already been pushed into the mainstream, but on the external display of clamshell foldable phones, such as the Galaxy Z Flip 7 and Motorola’s RAZR.
How will it look on a laptop? Clean, I’d say. The bigger question is what route Apple takes. Chuwi, a brand that is fairly popular in Asian markets, has given us a glimpse of at least one iteration where the camera is positioned in the upper left corner of the screen. It doesn’t look terrible, by the way.
Interestingly, Samsung gave us a glimpse of a far more futuristic design back in 2021 at the CES conference. The company showcased a concept with ultra-slim bezels where the camera was hidden underneath the display. Honor went a step ahead and removed the front camera entirely. Instead, it created a separate webcam module that sits in a dedicated slot and can be mounted magnetically atop the display.
I am glad the notch didn’t inspire others
Almost every Windows laptop, barring the gaming-focused machines, is inevitably compared against the MacBooks, which now put a notch on the Pro as well as Air models. It’s a high benchmark, and only a select few machines — such as the ZenBook A14 or Dell XPS 13 — have managed to stand out.
From speaker quality and display brilliance to sheer performance and battery mileage, the MacBook Pro sits in a league of its own. And it has been an aspirational benchmark for years. And yet, the notch hasn’t been copied. Asus pulled a reverse notch trend in 2019, and as of 2025, machines like the Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition continue to follow it.
Why? Well, because a display notch not only looks bad, but eats into screen real estate, too. It breaks the seamlessness of the user interface. For a company like Apple, which is known for its stunning attention to detail and thoughtful design for software, the notch was quite an absurdity.
Now, the 2021 MacBook Pro wasn’t a terrible laptop, and neither was its identical-looking M5 successor, if judged solely through an aesthetic lens. It’s a wide notch atop an otherwise gorgeous display that stood out like an eyesore. Yes, it was easy “getting used to,” yet it was always there.
There’s a reason why third-party apps, which add a black bar at the top to hide the notch, quickly popped up on the scene. Some apps like NotchNook turned it into a functional spot mimicking the activity hub that is Dynamic Island on the iPhones. But it was not just the sight that was problematic.
The notch ate into usable display space. It makes the menu bar look more crowded. It takes space that would otherwise let power users park a few more Menu Bar utilities at the top. It’s not a make-or-break functional trade-off. But it’s still very much there. And you will be reminded of its existence, unless you set a wallpaper that is strategically dark at the top and blends with with black enclosure.
Now that Apple is reportedly ditching the notch, for good, and embracing a punch-hole design, it’d be interesting to see whether the industry follows suit. I, for one, would lap it up. I just hope the punch-hole design doesn’t impede reparability or skyrocket the cost of replacements.
