"Objectively" is not the right word here. There's a reason I used the word taste, rather than looking at specs or technology or performance: it might be that a $0.99 McDonald's hamburger is "objectively" inferior to a $20 organic grass-fed medium-rare burger from a fancy restaurant; but if I prefer the McDonald's one, it's useless to tell me that my tastes are wrong.
Maybe I like the ritual of thumb-to-unlock, since it feels more under my control. Maybe there's instances in which I want to look at the phone without unlocking the device. Maybe I hate the stupid notch, and I want my screen to be a rectangle and not a rounded rectangle. Just because you don't value these things doesn't make your preference "objectively" correct.
> wastes almost an inch of screen space to nothing
(I also have a huge pet peeve with the bezels shrinking on recent iPads. However good the fancy touch-canceling algorithms get, they'll never compete with "I'm not touching the screen at all, so I'm 1000% sure this grip won't invoke an action.")
Maybe I like the ritual of thumb-to-unlock, since it feels more under my control. Maybe there's instances in which I want to look at the phone without unlocking the device. Maybe I hate the stupid notch, and I want my screen to be a rectangle and not a rounded rectangle. Just because you don't value these things doesn't make your preference "objectively" correct.
> wastes almost an inch of screen space to nothing
It's a feature, not a bug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_space
(I also have a huge pet peeve with the bezels shrinking on recent iPads. However good the fancy touch-canceling algorithms get, they'll never compete with "I'm not touching the screen at all, so I'm 1000% sure this grip won't invoke an action.")