The notch is such a wildly stupid idea I can't even begin with it. I actually kinda liked the direction they were going with the keyboard Touch Bar... but they killed that.
The idea is that you should consider the area around the notch to be extra, and not part of the normal screen. Show your game on the rectangular part of the screen, and use the extras for stuff that doesn't need the whole screen, like time, date, notification count, menu, whatever.
Having just the rectangular screen means not having the option of making those things visible, or having a smaller screen.
Why? Unless I am running a full screen app the notch gives me more screen space. Remember that the mac have the menu bar on top of the screen at all times so the space is not available for normal windowed apps.
I hide my menubar by default. I like using my space for stuff I'm actively looking at.
I was watching someone code in vim on a new mac the other day and the notch covered part of the first like of their editor! Like how does this not completely break you as a human. Maybe I'm a little OCD idk.
Isn't there just like an option to change the resolution and fix this? Apple should really have a "disable notch" mode.
The notch grants more usable vertical physical pixels than you'd have otherwise, with the only "downside" being a small unusable area in the center where the camera/mic/other sensors are placed.
I put "downside" in quotes because the alternative is just not having those vertical pixels at all, and having the screen end below the sensors.
The problem is, by granting more vertical space in such a way that requires additional application logic to avoid overlaps, you've taken a sacred abstraction (the rectangular screen) and shattered it.
Most applications do not handle this well, and I'm willing to bet that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.
I can see the allure. If you're a default macOS user with the menu bar not set to slide up when not in use, that space nicely fits. Problem still remains for fullscreen apps though.
And it's not even really a hardware problem. Apple could fix this in software. Just make using the unsafe region an opt-in for developers instead of the default. You want to paint in the unsafe region, call NSAllowUnsafeRegionResolution(). Boom done. By default, when the menu bar isn't shown, expose a rectangle to the viewport.
