Lol, prob repost but funny anyway.

Also Apple: our display's bezel is too thin to fit the front camera. Let's cut out a chunk of the display and make the ugliest iPhone design of all time.

Some random chinese manufacturer: How about we hide the camera in the device as long as it isn't needed so the phone doesn't look like a turd?

Everyone else: Let's copy Apple lol.

I saw this design of thin ethernet/modem in old PCMCIA type 1 cards around 1993 :)

So its been around a while.

@deadlyRants I don't get why it has to be the middle.

If you're going to do a notch, just take a small square out of the top right, and make the notification bar at the top the same height & completely black. That way, it looks like the camera is just another toolbar item to the right of the clock.

Moving parts tends to break bud. I prefer extra tft screen + the camera. Useful. @deadlyRants

@bittersweet This would kind of work with AMOLED, but not really. For situations when you want the status bar, it would be kind of okay, but the moment you want to hide it, you'd end up with either that square or the whole height of it cut out.

@Voxera It couldn't be that useful back then, at least for laptops. I'm not that old, but I remember a laptop from the mid 90s - it was thick enough to accommodate a fucking trackball.

@kamen That was the status quo with thicker plastic bezels — and a notch in the middle doesn't hide magically when watching fullscreen video either. A corner notch just seems like a better compromise.

Motorized cams are cool but probably prone to breaking and water/dust damage.

Until we can hide the cam behind a semi-transparent display, my vote is for either slightly thicker top bezels (I don't see what's wrong with the moto g6 plus for example) or a small corner notch.

this is an actual question: How hard would it be to redesign the ethernet head so it becomes smaller ?

We reduced the size of everything else why not ethernet ?

@bittersweet A corner notch doesn't magically hide either, even if it may be less obtrusive. Heck, even rounded corners are kind of a compromise, but here we are. Good that there are still manufacturers who opt out of all this at the expense of slightly thicker bezels - Sony, HTC, Motorola.

@Hallelouia Because people don't want wires and ports, and think ethernet is dead

@Hallelouia you shoud invoke @Condor here, he knows more about electronics challenges.

I am going to try an answer anyway. Compare it to USB-C: Ethernet as 8 pins, while USB-C as 24 pins. Even if you wanted a reversible head, you could still have 12 pins, so that's not an issue.

What's an issue is that the ethernet port, contrary to most other you use daily, is physically secured (it won't come off if you tug on it).

I'm ready to guess that's a very important feature in a server setting, and you can't easily make that smaller without making it more fragile, or having more expensive head.

Another thing is that an Ethernet cable is very easy to build & repair (can be done in under 10 min with proper equipment).

The alternative is to have 2 heads : one optimized for personal usage that is not secured, and one optimized for commercial usage that is secured. Standardization doesn't like alternatives, and it would make both more expensive too, due to lower economy of scale.

@Fradow It actually should be pretty doable to make it smaller. But the design of the Ethernet jack is pretty inefficient (at least in my opinion) because there needs to be clearance for accommodating 8 wires and their sleeves, as well as a small amount of the larger bit of plastic that encloses them all. And in CAT6 then there's also that cross-shaped piece of plastic that IMO is pretty useless (I mean it isn't grounded metal, so it's not like it's gonna block EMI/crosstalk anyway) and honestly.. twisted pairs are already pretty well designed to accommodate that.

4 pairs of wires, with each lead in a pair carrying the opposite AC signals from the other one. Twisted around one another so that they get roughly the same amount of interference, that can be filtered out on the receiving end. And standards below CAT6/CAT5e are even less efficient than that, because they use only 2 of the pairs instead of the current standard of all 4.

After CAT7 I'm pretty sure that we'll have to look for a redesign though. All the pairs are used and are already operating at a fairly high frequency of 250mHz per pair (for 1Gbps) or 2.5GHz (for 10Gbps). If we go much higher than that, we'd be well into RF sort of frequencies, which would be its own pile of issues. In fact, for 10Gbps lines we already are in that territory, so I'd say that it's pretty much required to go with optical fiber if you want higher than 1Gbps throughput. Otherwise microwave ovens might interfere too much and degrade the stability.

I think that optical may be the future of networking. Currently only available in datacenters and other places that require high throughput, but over time it'll trickle down to consumer just like everything else before it. And those optical connections are much thinner than the current 8 copper wires are. So connectors should be able to get smaller like that too. I just hope that the standards bodies won't just take the huge plugs that are currently in servers and call it a day.

Well, regarding efficiency in my second paragraph, it's mostly because the wires are in there regardless, even though they're left unused. The twisted pairs could possibly be redesigned in a way similar to coax, where the central part carries the signal and is enclosed within thin insulation, and then with a grounded metal shield around it. Doesn't need to be large like those coax wires in TV's, just the stuff that's in Wi-Fi equipment should do just fine I think. Especially since those are already operating at 2.4GHz.

Optical connections where photons are the carriers would be much better though, better suited for high frequencies and more compliant EMC-wise because the wire itself wouldn't emit any electromagnetic fields. Security-wise that'd be better as well because visible light (or IR/UV for that matter) can be better shielded away, and thus much harder to pick up by close by nefarious systems. So that's what I'd place my bets on.

@Condor I heard from a friend who installs industrial WiFi solutions that optical fibers don't like being bent too much, wouldn't that cause space and tidyness issues ?

@FrodoSwaggins Yeah, at higher frequencies, ESL and perhaps also some parasitic capacitance can become a real problem.. especially inductance though, and perhaps also the slope of whatever is generating the high frequency AC signal. At higher frequencies it becomes harder to generate them without them sagging, generating heat while transistors are switching on/off (I'm sure there's a name for that but I can't quite pin it down.. that high impedance state thing) or things like that. Optic would be so much better for a lot of things. Well the issues with driving the signal at super high frequencies wouldn't be really different than it is when driving a wire, but the issues with the wires themselves (interference etc) certainly would be solved when going optical.

@gajahterbang I'd say an iPhone's screen will break long before any camera mechanism.

Then again Apple devices aren't known for robustness.

Ugh, so much this. Apple kinda stopped being innovative a bit ago. There's very little new and revolutionary there, other than taking away basic connectors and putting people on stage to tell you how "brave" it is with a straight face.

Everything else they've done is iterative, and in many cases, better hardware specs with worse design.

@kamen pcmcia was expansion cards for laptops. Usually 1-3 slots of type 1-3

This made it possible to extend the laptop with network, faxmodem, extra harddrive, even extra graphics.

And since the only size card that normally could fit a network or modem cable was the type 3 which usually took two type one slots, getting it in a type one meant you saved a slot for something else.

So for a few years it was a big hit but then most of this was integrated on the motherboard and pcmcia or as it was later named pccard lost its usage.

@Hallelouia setting aside the technical challenges others have addressed there are one other major hurdle.

Changing a standard with world wide acceptance.

That never going to be easy proven by the fact that it still has the same physical shape for compatibility.

The technical part is often much easier than getting every one to agree.

@sexoverflow or just make holes in screen for front camera, sensors and earpiece.

@kamen I'm old enough to remember 2017 when you could fit full blown mechanical switches into the keyboard of some laptops.

@nathanchere I remember that too, but those are kind of different. This here is an ultrathin one, those were "gaming", almost desktop-replacement class laptops. Different priorities.

As of now, we might actually begin to see mechanical switches in thinner laptops too now that we have Kailh Choc and Cherry MX LP.