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Comment by paulcarroty | Hacker News Reader

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paulcarroty

mbp2020 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mbp.jpg

air2013 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-mba.jpg

iphonese2016 - https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-se.jpg

Perfect illustration of "Apple is iphone-first company".

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Unfortunately, a lot of this comes down to "no-one wants a laptop lid as thick as a phone". Without major technology changes, laptop webcams are never going to be good; there's just no room for the optics.

Stop making excuses, the Macbook Air lid is not as thick as a phone and is the best of the 3.

A lot of it has to do with how laptop web cams work in general and it is not only Apple's problem [1].

A way to improve this situation a bit would be to be able to use the camera of an iPhone as a web cam, either over USB or wifi. You still have the compression and USB transfer, but at least you use the better optics of the phone. There are third party tools, such as EpocCam, that can do it, but require the installation of drivers. This should be a first party solution, in the same fashion as the "take photo" option from the right click menu on Mac OS, which uses an iPhone to take a photo and paste it directly on the open application of the computer.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BLgS7m0W94

Microsoft solved the laptop camera problem just fine in their $399 Surface Go model [0]. Just takes a team that cares about the product enough to solve these tech issues I guess.

[0] https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2020/05/lenovo-thin...

Image on the right is from the Go.

I'd actually never encountered the "Take photo" option before. That's pretty nifty.

Having never owned a Mac, and only rarely used them, I had no frame of reference for many of the claims. The pictures were incontrovertible though. The camera is horrible. What really is the marginal cost of upgrading to whatever camera they use in a modern iPhone?

A laptop screen as thick as an iPhone, pretty much.

I'm typing this on a Surface Laptop 2 (and have a 2016 MacBook Pro), and the cover is nowhere as thick as a phone.

It's not sharp enough to cut bread, but those 2-3mm of thickness have zero impact on perceived laptop thinness while affording enough room for a spectacular webcam (by current Apple standards) and its companion Windows Hello counterpart.

I do wonder why they don't put more effort into the camera on the MBP. Of course it's not going to get used as a camera like a phone but with the economies of scale they have with the cameras going into iPhones you would think they could at least be on par with their own phone cameras from years ago.

Many more people are using the camera on their computers now for videoconferencing. Of course the decision was made long before anyone had heard of COVID-19, but it turned out to be a bad one.

Yeah I get their reasoning. It seems to still go against their brand positioning to have such a glaring omission of quality though. I remember when they would spend money figuring out how to poke tiny holes into the side of their laptops so they could have almost invisible battery charge indicators (now gone). You're not really supposed to consider if the quality of a feature on a Mac is good enough for something, it just should be. Hopefully they will sort it out.

The third URL doesn't work.

fixed, thx.

Please don't post pictures of myself into a third party website :)

Can you please remove the imgur post?

Fixed the broken link: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/img/cam-se.jpg

Seems like something @dang could fix if the original user can't edit the comment anymore - hopefully mentioning his name summons him. If not I think you might want to flag the comment.

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