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Last year, Apple unveiled a smartphone that looked completely different from all the other phones on the market.
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Hollis Johnson
One year later, that design is everywhere.
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Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider
Here's the OnePlus 6.
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Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider
Here's the LG G7 ThinQ.
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Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider
Here's the Huawei P20 Pro.
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Huawei
Here's the Asus Zenfone 5.
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Asus
Here's the OnePlus 6T.
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Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider
And here's the Pixel 3 XL from Google.
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images
See any similarities to Apple's design?
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Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
All of these smartphones have what people typically call a "notch," or a cut-out at the top center of the phone.
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Apple
Though Andy Rubin's Essential Phone was actually the first to introduce this design a few months before the iPhone X last year, it wasn't officially "a thing" until the iPhone X went on sale.
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Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider
Google, in particular, is driving the adoption of notches among Android phones. Aside from the new Pixel 3 XL, Google's latest version of Android supports notched smartphone designs, which makes it easier for other Android phone makers to build those kinds of phones. Great.
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YouTube/MKBHD
For what it's worth, copying Apple is nothing new — for better or worse.
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Thomson Reuters
Apple's smartphone designs have inspired the industry, and countless imitators, for years. Fingerprint sensors and virtual assistants weren't "a thing" until Apple put those features in an iPhone. These days, you can't find a smartphonewithout those features.
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Business Insider/Steve Kovach
It happened again this year. In the 12 months since Apple unveiled the iPhone X, with its edge-to-edge display and "notch" at the top of the phone, numerous phone makers have introduced new smartphones that look just like the iPhone X — notch and all.
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YouTube/SAMTIME
What's particularly funny is that the notch, in many ways, represents an imperfection with current smartphones.
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YouTube/sakitech
Apple specifically said the goal of the iPhone X was to make a smartphone that was "all screen" — and based on that definition, the iPhone X falls just short.
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Hollis Johnson
The iPhone's notch, though it powers a highly sophisticated security system, is the only blemish on an otherwise seamless display. It is edge-to-edge, technically, but not "all screen."
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Apple
In short, Android phone makers are squandering a golden opportunity to leapfrog Apple.
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Reuters
What's interesting is how few phone makers are even trying to solve this problem, as if the notch is not a clear design flaw. This phone from Sharp, for instance, has two notches!
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Sharp
To give credit where it's due, some companies are trying different things. Samsung chose not to go down the notch path at all with its Galaxy S and Note phones.
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Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider
Other groups, like Chinese companies Oppo and Vivo, are also experimenting with ways to hide the selfie camera when it's not in use.
Still, many companies, including Google, have simply accepted the notch without challenging it, or at least shrinking it. The notch on the Pixel 3 XL is massive, for instance.
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YouTube/MKBHD
Perhaps some phone makers think it's better to look like the competition than to try something different. But some day, probably soon, the iPhone will no longer have a notch, and other phone makers will then follow suit, eliminating the notches from their own phones. And we'll look back on this time — the Notch Era — and shake our heads in wonderment. We'll ask: Why did so many phone makers simply follow Apple, when they had a golden opportunity to jump ahead?
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YouTube/Unbox Therapy
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