AS [to her child]: Babes, what kinds of things do you want to happen next year?
Kid: A house made of pancake! Pool slime.
AS: You want pool slime?
Kid: Pool full with slime.
AS: Oh my gosh, that would be so cool.
[Break]
LG: Welcome back. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that sometimes things don’t go according to plan. We certainly all had ideas of how things would go this year, and here’s the fun part. A lot of them were wrong. For starters, let’s take it back to a year ago when we aired our 2019 end of year episode. It was me, Mike and our fellow writer, Arielle Pardes. She is not joining this episode. Julian is here. He’s going to weigh in. It’s going to be a lot of fun. I mean, basically, this is our big … We were wrong, guys.
MC: Speak for yourself.
LG: All right. Yes, we weren’t totally wrong. Mike, what was your prediction? How did it turn out?
MC: Well, I think our producer, Boone, is going to play a little clip here, but you can hear me talking about how I think the notch on the smartphone screen is going to go away.
[Clip from Gadget Lab episode 435]
MC: The death of the notch.
LG: Finally!
Arielle Pardes: RIP.
MC: The notches, there’s stuff there that we need. There are things like the cameras that run the face unlock software. There’s the selfie camera. There is the radar in there. I think that the future is going to be a phone that has all that stuff. It has face unlock. It has a selfie camera, but when you look at the front of the phone, all you see is the screen. You’re not going to see anything else. You’re not going to see a notch.
[Back to current hosts]
LG: Did it happen?
MC: Yeah, it did. Let me ask you, guys. When was the last time you thought about the notch on your phone?
LG: I mean, probably 2019 when we taped this episode. I just can’t tell you on the list of priorities, where the notch falls right now, it’s quite low.
MC: Right, but you look at your phone screen, and do you still see it?
JC: No.
MC: No!
LG: Let me see. Let me see. Hold on a sec.
JC: This year, most of them have transitioned to using the hole punch camera, so it’s even better in a way, at least I think so. I haven’t noticed it.
MC: Right. Even if you have a phone that has a notch, you don’t notice it anymore, because you’ve been living with it long enough, and the software has evolved to make it less of a big deal, right? You just don’t see it anymore. Even though the hardware design has not eliminated it, our minds’ eyes have eliminated it. I’m going to argue that I was absolutely 100 percent correct. I want my gold star.
LG: Julian, you’ve reviewed a lot of phones that have a pinhole camera. Is there any noticeable difference?
JC: I just think pinhole cameras are cooler. They just look cooler, the little floating circle. I mean, it is. You’re putting something into the display, and it’s surrounded by display. It just looks very cool. I never hated the notch. I mean, there were some phones that had some really bad notches, pixel three, but I will say that I didn’t really care for them. They were fine, but now, of course, it’s nicer and better that they’re getting smaller. That just goes to show that it really didn’t matter that much.