Re: Feature trickle down
Lots of phones are going to have notches, especially the Chinese ones. Really, I don't get the fuss - on an OLED screen the black status bar is indistinguishable from the bezel anyway. Most people most of the time don't have an entire stutus bar full of icons, leaving a black areas in the middle. Why not stick the camera and earpiece there?
Phones are getting taller (2:1 is becoming very common) to allow users to read more text with less scrolling (the upper limit on the width of the phone being constrained by hand size), so the whole notched area of the screen is beyond that covered by the common 16:9 aspect ratio for video, never mind the 4:3 output of the phone's own camera.
I just haven't read anyone make the case for the downsides of a notch other than aesthetics - which are a function of the OS and software (Apple made a deliberate decision to highlight the notch, not every version of Android does). Again, OLED screens allow the notch to be invisible when just showing the status bar.
An interesting article about lasers, specifically the challenges in cutting OLED substrates. Notches don't really add to the difficulty, since serious engineering challenges had to be overcome just to produce high doing OLEDs at smartphone sizes:
https://www.industrial-lasers.com/articles/2018/03/manufacturing-challenges-in-laser-cutting-oled-displays.html
Biting the hand that feeds IT
