Is anyone else fed up with with the chorus of “ugly” for the new iPhones? For example https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/09/10/apple-iphone-11-vs-iphone-11-pro-whats-the-difference-new-iphone-upgrade/#62c320886818 seems to be working on the principle that if you can just say it enough times it will become true.
I don’t know the reason that Apple engineers put the camera in the corner rather than the middle, but I do know why I would make the same decision. I regularly turn my phone upside down to take photos of small objects close up and face on. When the phone is upside down, a camera on the edge of the phone can get closer and has more flexibility of viewing angle because the body of the phone doesn’t get in the way. Locating the camera in the corner of the phone allows for both portrait and landscape orientations. I discovered this when photographing my cat - getting a face to face portrait rather than a “human looking down on cat” angle.
Ugly because it looks like a stovetop is just as daft. A stovetop looks like it does because you want to cook with different pans simultaneously. Again, the function defines the form.
Ugly because of the hump? Well we’ve been there for the past few years. The alternatives are either the whole phone is as thick as the hump, or the camera is compromised. The hump disappears when you use a case. Not everybody wants to use a case, but as one of the many who do, the camera hump is a non issue.
Ugly in general is an opinion, not a fact. It’s disappointing to see journalists pick on something without saying what they would do better, and stick this label on an incredible piece of engineering.
Apple seemed here to be quietly highlighting the camera module instead of designing it to be more discreet, like the landing strips seen on Android Phones; perhaps they wanted to make a statement about the phones photo capabilities (the phone’s major advancement being marketed). With modern phones being a single glass slab without physical front buttons, Apple executed a visual identity on the front of the iPhone with the ‘notch’, and you can easily tell an iPhone apart from more generic Huawei/LG/Moto phones. Perhaps the designers similarly deliberately chose this time a visual identity for the back so anyone, from any angle, could see that someone was using an iPhone.
When I saw the new iPhone Pros at my Apple Store I did think that the back camera unit looked a bit overgrown… then thought so what.
Overgrown! Love it! Camera-to-phone ratio too high. Factual at least 
With the notch, we can see it as an absence or as the presence of two functional “Batman Ears” - https://www.macstories.net/news/iphone-x-review-roundup/.
Gordon Kelly over at Forbes.com is a click-bait maestro… 
Just have a look at his article titles over the course of a month or so (not that one would need that long). The pattern is laughable, and oh-so-obvious.
I see the camera mound going the way of the notch very quickly: There will be memes/thousands of words written about it, and then – they all look like that…
Good news, bad news, doesn’t matter. Almost anything about Apple gets clicks. Clicks, eyeballs, money. That is what’s most important to the news media.
My favorite iPhone was the “you’re holding it wrong” iPhone 4 to 5s series (with the square frame design). The same basic design Apple returned to for the new iPad Pros.
But once I put an iPhone into a case (usually Apple leather or silicone) I rarely think about how it looks.
Yes Forbes reviews have click bait titles and I normally avoid reading them. I got into these because I saw a series of articles comparing models pairwise. I thought the article was mostly fair, but the “ugly” is annoying.
I think it would be much worse if Apple released new phones and no one noticed.
Unfortunately, Forbes has tarnished its brand by building out a ‘contributor network’ with their name attached. The Forbes Contributor Network is separate from Forbes magazine, and is basically a business-oriented HuffPost or Medium, to which pretty much anyone can post, but people like Kelly get the imprimatur of the Forbes name with their clickbait (on which Forbes profits)
Never ever ever read Kelly. He legit has written stuff about fake security stuff on the Windows side that he pulls out of thin air. Forbes is a joke.
I think that the new 11 Pro phones aren’t ugly at all; they’re great looking phones. I don’t read anything from Forbes anymore though, because of click bait crap like that. It’s not just limited to Apple news either. They have (for me) ruined their credibility.
New iPhones are not ugly. But the phone’s design is obsolete and the camera design is lazy. They are also quite heavy and I bet Steve Jobs is turning in his grave because of the hideous display notch. Using an LCD on a $700 phone in 2019 is also something only Apple has the audacity for.
But once Apple starts bleeding because of Apple TV+, maybe they will try harder
This is very zen. 
I noticed just a constant stream of anti-Apple articles from Forbes in the news app for a while. I googled it to see if there were any known Forbes/Apple conflicts. As has been commented above, it just seems to be nonsense written to get clicks. I ended up setting Forbes to “disliked” so it won’t show up anymore.
As for the camera hump, my theory about why they’re clustered the way the are is so that each lens has more or less the same view-point. Given the ability to transition from wide through to zoomed, the further the lenses are apart, the tricker that would be / may result in a shift in perspective. I noticed on one of the android phones, the lenses are all in a line, consequently, changing from one to the other would mean your framing will shift slightly.
My biggest gripe with the lens hump is the fact that it’s a hump. If I was designing it, I’d want the lenses recessed to protect them from bumps / scratches / scrapes.
In the words of the modern-day philosopher Stacy Ann Ferguson:
Trying to feel my hump, hump
Looking at my lump, lump
You can look, but you can’t touch it
If you touch it, I’mma
Start some drama
You don’t want no drama
No, no drama
No, no, no, no drama
I’m paraphrasing, of course.
I want, desire, covet, need one because of the camera!
That spider has beautiful eyes 
No. Spiders are hideous creatures and if you like them, you are evil. 
Marty, what is it about the new iPhone’s cameras that you dislike? What newer screen should they have used?
The camera design is lazy. The camera is just a little too dominant and it disrupts the overall flow of the phone design. Display on iPhone 11 should be OLED as well and both types should have a minimal display notch.