Apple is turning a design quirk into the iPhone X’s defining feature

Draw me an iPhone. The lines may be squiggly, the rounded corners imperfect, but

almost everyone you pose this challenge to will present you with the shape of a rectangle containing another rectangle sat atop a circle. The iPhone’s silhouette is the most iconic outline in all of modern technology, recognized by even diehard Android fanboys and featured on the side of “Made for iPhone” accessory boxes around the world. It’s a brand and a logo in its own right. Now, after 10 years of the home button and big bezels, Apple is giving us something new. The notch. The monobrow. The annoying black protrusion getting in the way of your photos and videos. However you choose to see the black cutout housing sensors at the top of the new iPhone X, you will most definitely see it. And Apple wants it that way. Instead of trying to design its way around the notch — which could have been done by distributing the iPhone X sensors more widely in a slimmer, full-width top bezel — Apple chose to have it there. There’s no doubt that you need to have at least some space for a front-facing camera and various sensors at the front of the phone, but the Xiaomi Mi Mix, Galaxy S8, and LG V30 have all shown you can have the sensors and still not intrude upon the main screen. Apple took a design limitation and decided to lean into it: as with the Essential Phone’s signature camera cutout, the iPhone X sensor array is cut out from the screen deliberately and purposefully.                                                                          https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/14/16306244/apple-iphone-x-design-notch