Apple may resort to software trickery to hide the notch on the iPhone 14 by making punch-hole and pill cutouts in the form of a continuous, longer pill.
- What is happening? An anonymous source said that in iOS, the individual notch cutouts on the iPhone 14 will look like a single pill shape.
- Why care? While the notch area will take up less space on an iPhone 14, creating hole-punch and pill-shaped cutouts, since the longer pill shape can improve the experience when scrolling, using apps, and more.
- What to do? Download and try apps that help hide the notch to see how Apple can make the notch on the iPhone 14 less visible.
How Apple can improve the iPhone 14 notch
According to an anonymous source at MacRumors, Apple may be using software trickery to make the iPhone 14’s notch look like a single pill shape.
Instead of sticking to a jagged aesthetic, it is suggested that Apple opted to turn off pixels in the dead space between the notches to create the look of a single tablet shape that is less distracting when viewing content on the screen.
iOS can also darken the area around the pill-shaped cutouts (for the camera and TrueDepth sensors) and hole punch (for the selfie camera) to accommodate content.
For example, Apple could make the area a little wider to fit status icons to the left and right, or even expand it down to a large rounded square when delivering certain notifications.
This information is from an anonymous source, so take it with a pinch of salt.
Why don’t we believe this rumor
MacRumors also can’t tell if the chatter found in sketchy Weibo posts suggesting the same unified tablet software implementation can be trusted.
If this information is correct, consider us surprised. iOS software tricks have no priority to hide the notch. Since the iPhone X, which introduced Face ID and the notch, Apple has made no effort to hide the notch in the software.
With the cutout on this year’s iPhone 14 family taking up even less space than before, why would Apple suddenly bother to make two smaller cutouts into one continuous shape?