Apple, stop this nonsense and just put a decent camera in your laptops

This really is quite funny. I&#x27;m calling it now: that mount is going to cost you as much as a decent 3rd party webcam.<p>This is the sort of product that I would&#x27;ve expected Apple to put out just around when they introduced the touchbar and removed every port off their laptops. They know their laptop camera is crap, but rather than fixing it, they&#x27;ve decided to build an entirely new, overpriced dongle to solve the problem they themselves created. It doesn&#x27;t even pass the sniff test. &quot;You can use your phone as your webcam!&quot;.... ok, now what happens when I&#x27;m on a meeting and need to look at my phone? &quot;Well what we&#x27;ve got another dongle that projects your Apple Watch onto your macbook so you can use it as a phone!&quot;

Have <i>any</i> companies actually done this yet?<p>I&#x27;m a lover of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notebookcheck.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notebookcheck.net&#x2F;</a> &amp; they have really really evolved some very good scientific tests. I can&#x27;t think of the last time I saw them say a laptop camera was anything but poor.<p>My previous everyday-carry laptop, a Dell Venue 11 Pro, a 2-in-1 tablet- had a front-facing 8MP shooter and a 2MP selfie camera. At one point both were indeed available to me in Linux, but I think the 8MP disappeared at some point, somehow. I&#x27;d be interested to see if that was any good- the mere fact that it had two cameras is a sign that they kind of gave some kind of a crap, that maybe perhaps the (non-video-conferencing) camera might actually have been somewhat passable. Probably not!

By all means make them better but I wouldn’t trade off screen real estate, price, or basically anything else for a better built in webcam. I simply don’t care enough about my image quality on Zoom, and for anything more important than that I’ll be using an external solution anyway.

Pros of reusing a phone camera:<p>1. High quality camera, far better than most laptop cams. 3 lenses and a highly mature image processing software stack.<p>2. Environmentally friendly. All resource usage &amp; pollution associated with manufacturing another high quality camera disappear.<p>3. Economical. You don&#x27;t have to pay for a higher quality camera to be manufactured and installed in every macbook.<p>Cons:<p>1. Looks&#x2F;seems silly<p>Ok?

For recording and viewing live content on a 14.5±1.5 inch screen, 1080p is good enough. My main concern would be frame rate. A smooth 1080p60 stream is better than a choppy one at 4K30. And such a camera is not too expensive or difficult to house under a thin chassis as Framework itself has demonstrated.<p>More importent elements to focus on would be good low-light detection &amp; compensation as well as accurate color processing and low-latency audiovisual synchronization.

The clip is an ugly solution, but still it seems better than any other I could think of off the top of my head:<p>- Wait to out until someone invents a unique light capture system in the future which meets expectations.<p>- Shoot the same image multiple times with multiple cameras and use ML to create a composite image of good quality.<p>- Shoot different quadrants with multiple cameras and stitch them together.<p>- Add a bump at the top edge of the screen to get the depth needed for multiple lenses and then a notch under the trackpad for the bump to fit into. The fact they have the huge bump on the iPhone Pro does indicate they are willing to compromise a bit on form factor for function and a notched trackpad would match them notched screen.<p>- Add a fragile spring loaded bump which pops out as the screen is opened.<p>- Add a fragile mechanical bump that needs to be lifted into place to enable the webcam.<p>- Put wide angle cameras in the bottom case for a reverse desktop view.<p>- Instead of an external clip bump the Apple up to the top edge for a magnetic QI charger built into the back of the screen (current solution without needing to carry a clip).<p>- Make the screen thicker and use the unused space for additional light weight battery capacity and&#x2F;or some sort of ePaper scribble surface.<p>I hope they gather enough data from this clip experiment to justify experimenting with a compromise solution.

I love how this is exactly the kind of functionality the armchair designers would suggest (‘Apple would rather have you pay for a better camera when you already own one!’), but once again it’s not good enough.<p>You can’t fit a good camera in a laptop screen, because it’s not thick enough. It doesn’t fit! Cameras need depth and that’s not available in a 1 mm lid. And Apple isn’t going to make the lid thicker just to fit a better camera. To make it as good as the iPhone camera, the lid would have to be as thick as an iPhone, including the camera bump, which is ridiculous.

A bit of perspective that I&#x27;ll give in on.<p>Cameras on phones and cameras on laptops&#x2F;PCs are radically different devices. You can&#x27;t just take a phone camera and slap it onto a PC. The other side of this is that cameras on PCs just suck in general.<p>They&#x27;re working around a massive achilles heel in the flow: Cameras in USB are limited to USB2 Full Speed. Somewhere around 1080p60 is where the practical limit kicks in, at about 30-80Mbit&#x2F;s.<p>That&#x27;s enough for H.264 baseline encoding at 1080p60 easily. Problem: Realtime H264 and HEVC encoders are power hungry, big, and bulky. Elgato&#x27;s game capture hardware has a streaming delay of up to 1-2s for &quot;real time&quot; 1080p USB capture, typically ranging in the 200-500ms delay times. Those devices get hot, cost $$$ ($180) and are purpose built. There&#x27;s no guesswork as to why a &quot;pro&quot; streamer setup nowadays consists of a higher end DSLR or HDMI camera on a capture card: It&#x27;s simply better: There&#x27;s more bandwidth dedicated to it, there&#x27;s more hardware doing the compression, and there&#x27;s more glass to work with.<p>Now, Phones (At least, a lot of Android phones) use a totally different interface, called MIPI CSI or the Mobile Industry Platform Interface Camera Serial Interface (say that a bunch of times fast), which defines a high speed (2-8 lane) non-USB interface. Part of the issue is that these standards are licensed. IANAL, but I do know that the MIPI alliance would not like it if Apple just slapped their camera stack right onto their SoC for laptops and later desktops. There&#x27;s actually nothing stopping them from shoveling MIPI CSI over USB3 and writing a driver on the other side that consumes the video stream. Heck, you&#x27;d get RAW 10-bit color out of your <i>laptop camera</i>. The issue comes when, again, licensing kicks in.<p>*However*, I will give that there is a further problem that Apple is facing: To do this, they&#x27;d have to make their laptops thicker. In the iPhone 13, the triple-camera setup is at least 7mm thick, which on their new Air model would leave only 4mm for... The rest of the machine. Thick lids are, in Apple&#x27;s design language, the mark of the &quot;old&quot; and relegated to the non-Apple ecosystem. M1 macbook pros had a spat where they would spontaneously shatter the LCD due to inconsistent thermal expansion, mostly because of the lack of rigidity in the overall frame.

1920x1080 isn&#x27;t terrible for a webcam (something you typically use for video calls where the feed is often not nearly at that resolution). It&#x27;s not the resolution that could use improvement, but the overall video quality.<p>If you need to shoot 4K for something, there are plenty of options out there. But I think a laptop camera would be better off advancing the current standard in terms of video quality than in resolution.

I actually really enjoy the crappy camera in my 2020 Air. I work out of my garage which is pretty far away from the wireless router. Absent of running Ethernet through the walls or using a non-ideal mesh and halving the speed, there’s no easy way to get really good internet in there currently.<p>I use it to take video calls instead of my much nicer Logitech cam on my desktop since the crappy camera works just fine on the weak signal.

I&#x27;d rather take a worse image quality if it means they can get rid of the notch. For video calls, the current camera is definitely good enough.

Yeah, what a terrible idea to give all the people that already own a mac not the possibility to use a better camera that they also ALREADY own...

This article sounds like it&#x27;s written by a kid crying because he didn&#x27;t get the extra candy he demanded.<p>1. 1080p is plenty for videoconferencing. We&#x27;re not filming a movie, are we?<p>2. you&#x27;re given the option to use a far more competent camera if you&#x27;d like<p>3. provided you don&#x27;t absolutely _need_ the clamp for this to work (I don&#x27;t know), you could position the camera in a much better place than in the &quot;up your nose&quot; position.<p>This is a nice feature. Why is that dude crying?

The nonsense is that you pay them in the first place.

But the built in camera is already decent though?

Is this just their version of DroidCam? :-P

<i>or</i> the $1500 screen :)

Steve wept.

Apple has all the hardware, firmware and software to make the webcam excellent. The fact they haven’t done that is a bit suspicious given that a ”noisy, low-resolution, unprocessed” camera is ideal for low bandwidth machine learning.