iPhone 14 Pro's Dynamic Island comes to iPad in this ingenious concept art
Make it happen, Apple.
The iPhone 14 Pro's 'Dynamic Island' was arguably the star of the show of Apple's product launch event last week. While we'd heard tell for a while that Apple was planning to replace the infamous 'notch' with a floating pill-shaped design, we didn't expect it to be quite so interactive (or to have quite such a ridiculous name).
Dynamic Island turns a necessary evil into a feature, by turning the area around that dead pixel space into a glorified notification area which can change size and shape. It's a decidedly Apple-esque piece of design ingenuity – and concept artist are already imagining it making the leap to other products. (Want to know more about Dynamic Island? Check out our guide to the iPhone 14.)
Concept artist Parker Ortolani has shared a strikingly realistic vision for an iPad Pro complete with Dynamic Island, and it's already going down a storm on Twitter. Rather than a single widget, the concept imagines the dynamic island as a series of, well, islands, capable of displaying a surprising amount of information. Ortolani calls it a "perfect solution for bringing the menu bar to iPadOS in a new and fluid way."
Imagine Dynamic Island taking iPad Pro to a whole new level. It could be that perfect solution for bringing the menu bar to iPadOS in a new and fluid way. Apps and multitasking taken even further. pic.twitter.com/yPxt2GiW4XSeptember 8, 2022
Of course, there are a few hoops the iPad would have to jump through for this to become a reality. For a start, there's never been an iPad with a notch – instead, Apple usually hides the FaceID camera inside the bezels. But if a new Dynamic Island allowed the iPad to have even tinier bezels as we can see in this concept, it would be a double-win for users.
"I love this! Imagine multiple audio streams playing on an iPad, with easy access to them in Dynamic Island," one user responds, while another adds, Bingo, it's a great real estate play if they do roll it out OS-wide." Indeed, it's easy to see how the concept could take multi-tasking to a new level on iPadOS. And with the MacBook embracing the notch, is it a stretch to imagine that it too could one day embrace Dynamic Island?
Of course, these are early days for the feature – it won't even be landing in the first users' hands until the end of this week. Time will tell whether it proves to be as big of a hit in practice as it has in theory – or whether it's destined to go the way of the MacBook Pro Touch Bar (which some have compared Dynamic Island to). Speaking of doomed Apple products, let's spare a moment's thought for the iPhone mini.
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Daniel John is Design Editor at Creative Bloq. He reports on the worlds of design, branding and lifestyle tech, and has covered several industry events including Milan Design Week, OFFF Barcelona and Adobe Max in Los Angeles.