Leaked: Apple explored designs for notch and dynamic island design

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Apple explored designs for notch and dynamic island design

With the 2022 iPhone 14 Pro models, Apple introduced a notch and dynamic island that can transform and expand to display system alerts, sports scores, and a variety of other information. This feature enables more space around the front camera and Face ID sensor compared to the notch on older iPhone models.

According to information obtained by MacRumors, Apple considered various ideas for the iPhone’s notch area for years before arriving at the current dynamic island design. To give you a never-before-seen look at some of the concepts Apple considered, we’ve recreated the images below based on the source material.

Before Dynamic Island, Apple created a popover menu on the right side of the screen that gave users quick access to the time, cellular signal and Wi-Fi strength, display brightness, volume, and battery charge level. I was considering doing this. The menu essentially looks like a second notch and disappears when not in use.

Another idea considered by Apple was to hide the notch in the all-black status bar area at the top of the screen. This design likely helped save battery life, as OLED displays display black by turning off individual pixels.

Apple then came up with the idea of a dynamic island and considered various designs for it, as shown in the picture below.

Apple initially made the dynamic island permanently tall at the top of the screen, then decided that it could be resized as needed to move it out of the way. Apple also considered displaying an entire row of volume and system shortcuts in a dynamic island, testing layouts that aren’t used for things like ongoing calls.

Apple has since extended Dynamic Island to all iPhone 15 models, but continues to sell the iPhone 13, iPhone 14, and iPhone 14 Plus with a notch. Rumor has it that Apple will eventually move the iPhone’s front camera and Face ID sensor below the display, but that change isn’t expected to debut until early next year.

While the transition from Notch to Dynamic Island took a full six years, the Apple team may be hard at work figuring out what the next logical step would be. There was a warning for the camera below the screen (camera quality may be compromised), and bezels were definitely not there. The iPad was able to deal with the problem by including a notch in its relatively thin bezels, but the same bezel thickness could not be achieved in the much smaller iPhone. And in 2022, Apple announced the notch’s successor, a more independent notch, and called it Dynamic Island. What are the benefits? It changes to different shapes and sizes depending on your inputs, giving you an uncompromising foothold.

However, information obtained by the folks at MacRumors provides a valuable glimpse behind the curtain of Apple’s design process and, more importantly, what they got in exchange for a dynamic island. Meat. Concepts range from the acceptable to the downright absurd, with some suggesting two notches instead of one. Here’s a look back at the six years of brainstorming that took Apple’s design office from a notch to the now-ubiquitous Dynamic Island.

The notch first appeared on the iPhone X, a commemorative phone celebrating the 10th anniversary of the product line, in 2017. This soon became a meme and then standard equipment on iPhones, but needless to say, Apple wanted to find a better solution. The first solution was in the form of an additional notch to make the existing notch more attractive. This notch, shown in the image above (left), effectively becomes your control center, but it disappears when not in use. Objectively, I’m glad Apple didn’t implement this. Because it’s completely horrible. This creates a distinctly uncomfortable (even temporary) screen size, which is an ergonomic nightmare for left-handed people. Another option was to completely black out a portion of the screen to hide the notch (top right). Although this seemed like a much more acceptable feature, it was a setback for Apple’s zero-bezel efforts. However, the top of the screen on either side of the notch remains black most of the time, which helps save battery power.

Ultimately, the company arrived at a dynamic island but struggled to find the right way to make it “dynamic.” Early explorations showed dot-like icons emerging from the island during use, while other explorations revealed that the island had deformed into large blocks with increasing or decreasing volume before returning to its original shape. I was seen. It almost put Apple on the right path, but it wasn’t there yet. Another concept featured the entire island turning into a control center (which, frankly, I like). Meanwhile, one concept provided a second skin to the island in the form of tinted windows.

Finally, Apple has figured out a way to dynamically turn islands into widgets based on apps and processes, providing something more elegant than the concept presented here. But that’s the nature of the design process, whether you’re a small startup or a trillion-dollar company. You keep trying, thinking, evaluating, failing, and going back to square one until you find something that works. Well, this should take 6 hours.

Before Apple announced the iPhone 14 Pro models in 2022, there was speculation that the notch on the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max would be replaced with a double pill and hole cutout. In January 2022, eight months before Apple introduced the feature, we showed you an accurate representation of a dynamic island.

When Apple unveiled Dynamic Island during its 2022 event, the first reaction from some people watching the livestream was awe and excitement. Others were not impressed. This year, Dynamic Islands is now available on all four iPhone 15 models, allowing more iPhone users than ever before to experience the feature. I was one of the excited people when Dynamic Island was announced, but mostly I was underwhelmed by it.

According to information obtained by MacRumors, Apple considered other locations and formats before deciding on the final placement and functionality of Dynamic Island. Based on the information we received, MacRumors has rendered what these other concepts could look like if Apple chose a different method to replace the notch.

An alternative to the dynamic island was to place a vertical screen on the right side of the display, displaying some of the icons typically found in the status bar at the top right of the screen. It displayed the time, cell phone signal strength (the infamous bar), Wi-Fi indicator, display brightness, volume, and battery life indicator. This screen remains hidden when not in use.

Apple explored designs for notch and dynamic island design

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