iPhone 14 Pro Max Is the dynamic island a novelty?

[Jamo12]

When I use my wife’s 11 instead of my 14 pro max I miss the island. The island being ‘worth it’ really depends on if you do more than one thing on your phone at a time.

I don’t agree when people say it is for notifications because regular notifications do not show up in it. I guess if they mean system notifications (Face ID, silence switch, low battery alert, lock icon, etc.) then I can agree with that. It is clearly the superior way to display those. It’s both easy to see and out of the way.

If you are one to listen to music/podcasts and web search at the same time, then it’s nice. As a father of a toddler, I often need to immediately stop what I am doing (either to stop destruction, care for a child in distress or be a part of/capture a moment) and the island can help me pick up where I left off without fiddling around as much. I really like it for my driving directions (the wife can go through music while I still have directions at the top). I use my phone for recipes in the kitchen and being able to see my timer and recipes at the same time is a culinary wonder.

If you are just using your phone as a phone, you won’t get much of anything from the island besides prettier system notifications and it won’t matter all too much for you.

Besides cutting in slightly on a 2:1 video and being slightly more distracting than the notch in a small number of circumstances, it is definitely better than the notch.

If you are a ‘power user’, it might be worth upgrading for.

 

[Tyler O'Bannon]

It’s young. The concept of a dynamic, interactive one-stop-shop for all notifications, alerts, activities, and live/ongoing notifications like scores and Ubers is a great idea. Building it around the pill cutouts is also cool. Now it needs time to grow, evolve, and most importantly, be supported at large by most apps

 

[iiiiiMAC!!!!!]

I think the island is superior to the notch. It allows for extra room on the lock screen and the UI around it is fun. I think we’ll see its design become more useful over time.

Extra room on the lock screen? You mean those extra couple of pixels? Is that really good enough to mention as a positive?

 

[iiiiiMAC!!!!!]

FWIW, I thought the Touch Bar was pointless. Not even close to being in the same category as the others. I may be completely wrong here, but I think the island is here to stay.

Can I ask why the touchbar was pointless? Ive never owned a macbook, but I would have thought that a screen that could change the buttons based on different applications would be quite handy and useful

 

[iiiiiMAC!!!!!]

FWIW, I thought the Touch Bar was pointless. Not even close to being in the same category as the others. I may be completely wrong here, but I think the island is here to stay.

I think its here to stay for maybe 3-5 years, like the notch, but I dont think this will/can be something that stays for too long. They have to perfect under the screen touch id sooner or later

 

[fatTribble]

I think Dynamic Island has a lot of potential regardless of whether Apple removes the pill.

Prior to this, we had two ways of seeing the status of something an app is doing. We could open the app or we could get a notification. For anything ongoing, opening the app repeatedly gets old. Notifications are only good for the moment it was sent.

Now we have a true status area.

Here are some things we could see in Dynamic Island:

If someone in my Find Me app sets my home as a destination, I could see their trip progress including minutes until arrival

Apps like NASA could display the countdown until launch for a mission and then x number of minutes or hours afterwards until the mission completed or reached a certain point. Similarly how about a countdown for when the space station is visible at my location

If I download an entire season of Gilligan’s Island in iTunes before a flight I could see the download progress

A progress bar for the duration of a restore from iCloud or transfer from my old iPhone when setting up a new iPhone

Weather could display all kinds of things like minutes remaining in a tornado warning, minutes until rain starts or ends, etc

The Health app could show me my heart rate for x minutes after any workout

Those are some of my thoughts. I’m hoping that eventually so many apps will use Dynamic Island that Settings will allow you to choose which apps you want to allow.

 

[VSMacOne]

Extra room on the lock screen? You mean those extra couple of pixels? Is that really good enough to mention as a positive?

No, I mean the extra rows of content that iOS 16 on an iPhone 14 Pro/PM shows on the Lock Screen compared to on the 13 series. I definitely see that as a positive. But even beyond that, the “dynamic” aspect of the island is a great innovation, and not really something seen before in a smartphone.

Can I ask why the touchbar was pointless? Ive never owned a macbook, but I would have thought that a screen that could change the buttons based on different applications would be quite handy and useful

In my limited testing, the biggest drawback for me was having to take my eyes off the screen to use it because the layout on the bar kept changing.

I think its here to stay for maybe 3-5 years, like the notch, but I dont think this will/can be something that stays for too long. They have to perfect under the screen touch id sooner or later

I doubt Apple is ever going back to TouchID, when FaceID is much more secure and clearly innovations like the dynamic island work. I think the concept of how notifications are displayed on iOS will definitely be altered by the island even once Apple moves to a full screen display with faceID under the screen.

 

[Punny]

If by novelty you mean incredibly useful in my every day use of the phone ... then yes.

 

[kasakka]

I think Dynamic Island has a lot of potential regardless of whether Apple removes the pill.

Prior to this, we had two ways of seeing the status of something an app is doing. We could open the app or we could get a notification. For anything ongoing, opening the app repeatedly gets old. Notifications are only good for the moment it was sent.

Now we have a true status area.

Here are some things we could see in Dynamic Island:

If someone in my Find Me app sets my home as a destination, I could see their trip progress including minutes until arrival

Apps like NASA could display the countdown until launch for a mission and then x number of minutes or hours afterwards until the mission completed or reached a certain point. Similarly how about a countdown for when the space station is visible at my location

If I download an entire season of Gilligan’s Island in iTunes before a flight I could see the download progress

A progress bar for the duration of a restore from iCloud or transfer from my old iPhone when setting up a new iPhone

Weather could display all kinds of things like minutes remaining in a tornado warning, minutes until rain starts or ends, etc

The Health app could show me my heart rate for x minutes after any workout

Those are some of my thoughts. I’m hoping that eventually so many apps will use Dynamic Island that Settings will allow you to choose which apps you want to allow.

All those are cool ideas but in its current form I feel dynamic island is poorly equipped to handle more than one or two statuses at the same time.

If you imagine even half of those things on your list were going on at the same time, most likely you would have a situation where your top bar is littered with icons you don't really know, sort of like the Android status bar tends to get cluttered with this stuff when a lot of things are going on.

You are spot on about showing the status of something ongoing as that has been kind of hard to track. Having moved back to Android recently, I sometimes feel that platform goes too far in telling me about what is going on where I have just had to silence notifications for a lot of apps because they were telling things that I considered irrelevant, like e.g app update installation progress.

Maybe in the future Apple allows you to prioritize what is shown in the dynamic island so you are seeing the most relevant thing but otherwise not burdened by clutter. Eg. a timer in the clock app would take priority over showing download progress or something.

 

[MacGiver]

If you like design and aesthetic you will love it. If you are 100% looking for something changing the UX you will be disappointed. For now personally I like it... It makes me feel I have something new, different, it is just for my eyes We'll see in the future if developers tend to use the DI or not.

 

[dk001]

If you like design and aesthetic you will love it. If you are 100% looking for something changing the UX you will be disappointed. For now personally I like it... It makes me feel I have something new, different, it is just for my eyes We'll see in the future if developers tend to use the DI or not.

That leads me to a thought we have all seen before; will devs use it just to put something there or will they effectively use it?

 

[KRG]

This was previously unused space that now has a bit of practical use that enhances multitasking and hides cameras. That's all there is to it.

It's not a groundbreaking feature imo, but it's certainly better than a static notch that adds nothing to the UI.

 

[Jackbequickly]

I naturally ignore it like I did the notch. Don’t even see it most the time.

 

[ILoveCalvinCool]

I don't think it's really "useful", per se. It's a stopgap measure until they figure out how to manage that camera area going forward. It will go away as soon as they solve that problem.

 

[DeepIn2U]

It isn’t a reason to upgrade.

Agreed yet I made that mistake and seen it first hand and thought as well for myself. Returned the 14 Pro.

Not to downplay its appeal and smoothness and the great design form Apples top designer. No no. I’m all honesty, I’ve not seen something so enticing in Apple’s UI since :

Time Machine,
OS X Puma when Jibs stated the maximize, minimize, and close buttons were like lozenges you’d want to eat lol.

It's just a notification style that happens to take advantage of the hardware limitations of the camera pill.

What hardware limitations, honestly please state. It’s smaller, faster, still much more secure and accurate than just a camera as currently implemented by the competition, and it’s now just as fast - when you ignore the animation. Fast without loosing the robust security that cannot be fooled by a picture or mask.

 

[Fred Zed]

love the Digital Island. Proof will be in the pudding when Samsung adopt their own version. You heard it here first.

 

[Pakaku]

What hardware limitations, honestly please state. It’s smaller, faster, still much more secure and accurate than just a camera as currently implemented by the competition, and it’s now just as fast - when you ignore the animation. Fast without loosing the robust security that cannot be fooled by a picture or mask.

The fact that there’s physical hardware there in the first place, or a hole in the screen. They took advantage of the "limitation" (the dark hole) and make a notification system that acts as if that hole is a dynamic object that changes shape and blurs the boundary between the physical hole and the virtual screen area.

 

[aurora_sect]

I agree with those who say they wouldn't upgrade just for the DI, but overall I feel it's a good direction. When idle, it is just a tiny bit more obtrusive than the notch to my eye. But I really like it for notifications and when I'm streaming audio. I'm sure good developers will do some cool and creative stuff with it. Island > notch to me.

 

[pdxmatts]

Besides cutting in slightly on a 2:1 video and being slightly more distracting than the notch in a small number of circumstances, it is definitely better than the notch.

Half of the pill showing in videos with larger aspect ratios than 16.9 was a deal breaker for my son who watches a lot of Youtube content from his favorite streamers. Of course that also applies to movies with aspect ratio 2.00 : 1. (Jurrasic World) for example. There are not many reviewers that mention this.