With the iPhone 13, Apple will be preparing its iOS aficionado army for the day when that design abomination called the notch will go the way of the Dodo in about two year’s time, reportedly with the iPhone 15.
The iPhone 13 to launch with a 25% smaller notch
That’s a reduction of over 25%, and will be making iPhone design history as it will be the first major change in the iPhone’s frontal design since, well, 2017 when the first iPhone with a notch made a cameo.
That left plenty of empty space in the middle where the earpiece and mic used to sit, so Apple simply clustered the Face ID kit elements closer to each other, and reduced the empty space on the sides to make the notch appear much more compact than it is now.
While those components may be miniaturized further for the iPhone 14, for now Apple’s rearrangement of the Face ID kit weighs much heavier into the new smaller notch design than if it had simply employed smaller dot projector and flood illuminator.
Apple simply moved the earpiece above the Face ID system to shrink the iPhone 13 notch
On the other hand, much more of those indispensable parts of Apple’s TrueDepth camera system can now be produced from a single wafer, so shrinking the VCSEL part of the Face ID technology by up to 50% will also contribute to Apple’s bottom line by lowering the iPhone 13 production costs further.
The iPhone 13 specs may list a modern screen-to-body ratio for the first time
Still, even as the cutout will be protruding slightly deeper into the display, that extension will be peanuts compared to the notch width shrinkage, so the effect on the iPhone 13’s screen-to-body ratio will be negligible.
Unfortunately, that is still a far cry from the best Android phones in that respect, and, while the iPhone 13 will inevitably be the iPhone with the best screen-to-body ratio so far, even its shrunken notch may not allow it to beat its best Android competitors as there the metric is already nearing the 90% threshold and even piercing it upwards.
