Apple’s new iPhone 13 , revealed at Apple’s California Streaming event in September, gets a tiny bit more screen real estate thanks to a …
Apple’s new iPhone 13, revealed at Apple’s California Streaming event in September, gets a tiny bit more screen real estate thanks to a tweaked redesign of the notch that houses the Face ID and 12-megapixel front-facing camera. The notch in the iPhone 13 occupies 20% less space than in the iPhone 12, with Apple touting that its TrueDepth camera system has been “reengineered to provide more display area.” In side-by-side shots, the notch is substantially less wide and appears to be slightly taller. It certainly takes up less space, but it’s not nearly as small as the punchhole designs seen on many recent Android phones like the Galaxy S21. However, those Android phones don’t typically offer face-scanning technology alongside a front-facing camera as the iPhones do. Read more: CNET’s iPhone 13,13 Mini, 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max reviews The iPhone 13 line redo reminds me of the much-maligned notch on the Pixel 3 XL — which was a design choice I preferred over the wider notch employed by the iPhone XR and XS phones back in 2018. That design, in which the notch was labeled as a “Display Cutout” in the phone’s settings, seemed to confuse and offend some of the phone-enthusiast community. It was chunky in comparison to the iPhone, while other Android phones of that year, like the Samsung Galaxy S9 and Google’s smaller Pixel 3, were employing a slimmer bezel to include the front-facing camera and similar features. And on top of that, a software bug that was later fixed sometimes added a second notch into the display. Yet the slimmer and taller design of the Pixel 3 XL’s notch included a few obvious and less obvious benefits, many of which now apply to the iPhone 13’s design.
