It was a day of farewells today at Apple’s ‘Far Out’ iPhone launch event. In addition to getting rid of the iPhone mini variant, Apple also ditched the notch on the iPhone 14 Pro in favor of a pill-shaped cutout. The company is calling this the “Dynamic Island” at the top of the screen. The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max also feature brighter screens and offer an Always On Display so you can always see your most important information. At the Apple Event in Cupertino, I spent some time with the new devices and have to say that while the dynamic island still feels very much like a notch, it also seems a lot more useful.
The difference is that the interface now makes better use of the space by displaying different information on it. When I started a countdown on the timer app or played a song on Apple Music, the island would show an orange dot to indicate something was happening. Then, when I left the app, the island displayed a waveform to show that my voice recorder was still running, or that music was playing. When I long-pressed the island with one of these activities going on, the box expanded to show more controls.
Apple Music, for example, expanded to show the playback progress bar and buttons for rewind, pause and skip below it. For Timer and Voice Memo, controls appeared for stopping the countdowns and recordings respectively. The software cleverly camouflages the camera hole here, so it never interrupts the content and is hidden with empty black space in that area.
When nothing was going on, long-pressing the dynamic island resulted in a slight stretching animation and light haptic feedback. If you peer hard at the pill, you can also see the 12-megapixel TrueDepth camera off to the right under it.
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