You Can Double-Tap to Obscure the Notch While Playing Video on iPhone X

I’m not on board with Apple’s “embrace the notch” user interface, but I do find it commendable that they showed the notch everywhere during the keynote Tuesday. Compare and contrast with accusations that Apple was hiding the camera bumps on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in promotional photos back in 2014.

Apple truly did the opposite with the notch: they emphasized it, showing it even while playing full-screen video. There is very good news here: you can just double-tap video to toggle between filling the screen (which shows the notch on the left side, obscuring the left edge of the video) and preserving the video’s true aspect ratio (which hides the notch with black bars). And I think, but can’t confirm, that it will default to hiding the notch while playing video.

Update: Ben Bajarin did get an answer from Apple on this at the event, and I was correct: the default is for video not to zoom to fill every pixel, so you won’t see the notch in video playback unless you double-tap.

★ Friday, 15 September 2017