I thought the reason Android phones gained a notch was because Apple's screen supplier had too much unsold stock after the initially underperforming sales of the iPhone X.
In practice, missing the central part of the status bar must be magnitudinally more inconvenient than having a few millimetres of sensors / cameras / speakers along the top of a phone.
OTOH, could it be an industry scheme to trickle-down a retrograde 'feature' to mid-range phones, then re-introduce normal screens back to premium models, to hike up the long term price of a normal, usable phone?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
