Windows 11 laptops will require front facing camera in 2023

&gt; It seems our completely untethered tumble into the world of 1984 led by Big Brother and every all-seeing eye on the planet, with Microsoft pushing us through a new window and into a new era with Windows 11.<p>What a load of hyperbolic junk this is. Microsoft is trying to ensure consistency for people that buy Windows laptops. We can debate whether that is a smart move or not, but descending into 1984 fear-baiting is just nonsense.

&gt; It seems our completely untethered tumble into the world of 1984 led by Big Brother and every all-seeing eye on the planet, with Microsoft pushing us through a new window and into a new era with Windows 11.<p>Ah yes, that&#x27;s absolutely what it is, not an attempt to match what is already standard on every Apple laptop.

Is there a significant share of the laptop market that ships _without_ webcams?<p>I haven&#x27;t seen a single laptop manufactured in the past 15 years that doesn&#x27;t have a webcam built-in.<p>The actual good news is requiring it to be HD, so the days of potato quality video calls are soon over.<p>Besides, a lot of manufacturers are now shipping cameras with physical covers, I expect that trend to continue

Many corporate laptop models build a physical camera cover into the laptop lid now. Microsoft clearly wants to ensure everyone with a laptop has the option to join video calls, which makes sense, but it&#x27;s getting easier on new models to block this when intended.<p>Most Windows laptops sold today already have a front facing camera, and I expect camera covers to become as standard as cameras are.

If I&#x27;m following this correctly, this isn&#x27;t about the OS requiring a camera, it&#x27;s about microsoft not letting laptop manufacturers sell &quot;substandard&quot; machines with windows. You can almost certainly install the OS on a laptop without a camera, or a desktop, yourself.<p>Makes sense to me. People bundle their hardware experience with what they consider a windows machine vs. an apple machine.

I am still on Win7 because I hate Win10 telemetry (MS tried to shove in 7 too, but in 7 it can be removed entirely, not just disabled).<p>Windows 11 is shaping itself to be extra-special regarding that, unless my workplace requires it I believe I will just stick with Linux after whatever reason happens force me to stop using Win7. My wife computer is already Linux-only, no dual-boot.

I mean... is this a requirement for &quot;Windows logo certified&quot; laptops (they used to be a thing some years back, not sure if that is still the case), or will it be a requirement for the successful installation and functioning of Windows 11 on <i>any</i> laptop?<p>If the former, then I don&#x27;t see the big fuss, but if the latter, then no thanks. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I wonder how that&#x27;s going to work for government security agencies. I remember at one point touring the Pentagon (many years ago) and them saying how they explicitly disallowed devices with cameras in certain areas. No idea if that&#x27;s changed, but I could see Microsoft needing to have a separate security-version of the OS, or losing a lot of government clients.

I really like working with Windows10 and would also be very happy to use Windows11, but all this telemtry stuff(which I understand partially why they are doing some of it) and strange decisions like this are making it really hard not to switch to Linux.

Microsoft makes its Windows revenue from licensing to OEMs (and commercial), so <i>of course</i> they want people to buy new hardware.

I think it has been over 10 years since I&#x27;ve seen a laptop without a webcam. Even the long dead &quot;netbooks&quot; had front facing cameras.

While this is pretty meh compared to the other requirements, it clearly shows that MS can disregard all reason and consideration and just YOLO it. This is what lack of competition leads to. They can literally come up with the most absurd and contrived things their brains they can think of while on acid and the ones on the receiving end can only <i>shrug</i> it.

I&#x27;ve been using a camera cover for years. A piece of bent black cardboard first, a professional and almost invisible plastic slider now.<p>There are so many of them on Amazon, searching for laptop camera cover slide.<p>And I don&#x27;t even use Windows. I run Ubuntu but I want to be sure that the camera doesn&#x27;t see anything when it&#x27;s supposed to be off.

While it&#x27;s true that almost all recent laptops have built-in webcam and most of the time they don&#x27;t break themselves out of blue, I&#x27;d rather have the OS to not care about whether I do have one. None of microsoft&#x27;s business if I can&#x27;t&#x2F;don&#x27;t need to join a zoom or whatever on my pc.

What does &quot;require&quot; mean? It won&#x27;t install? Microsoft won&#x27;t put its sticker on it?

Oh please. Microsoft is trying to ensure a base level of functionality. If they didn’t ship with cameras, mac fanboys would mock them as they did in the old “switch” commercial when they taped a camera to the top of a computer.

Why not let the consumer decide. But anyway if it comes with a cover it&#x27;s fine

&gt; TPM 2.0 module requirement of Windows 11 acting as hardware-level DRM<p>well, seems like someone didn&#x27;t understand, what a TPM module can actually do and what it&#x27;s used for.

Can a manufacturer use &quot;duck typing&quot; for this? Something like an electronic component that looks like a front facing camera to the OS but is completely blind.

My webcam has a hinged lens cap (yay) but no way to disable the mike (boo).<p>So I still unplug it when not in use.

How this article draw a conclusion that front facing webcam is a mandatory requirement for Windows 11?

This feels like FUD. What laptop from a major OEM ships with Windows in $CURRENTYEAR without a webcam?

What&#x27;s the source for this claim?

Stupidness of this requirement aside are there any laptops you can buy now days without front facing cameras?<p>Can&#x27;t recall seeing any