Yet, the camera in my $2000 Macbook Pro? Remarkably worse than even the worse external webcam.
If they can throw an amazing camera in a phone, why can't they put a decent one in a laptop?
I'm quite sure that an iPhone not being able to lay flat on a table without wobbling would have caused Steve Jobs to throw it at whoever designed it.
At this point I can only assume they simply never managed to find a way to significantly improve the module while keeping things flush.
I enjoy the materials in my phone and I'd love to use it without a case, but when my phone bumped against a saltshaker and the glass back panel cracked, I felt miffed to pay 160 euros to have that replaced when a 10 euro case would've prevented any damage.
Fair point, but Apple isn't the only company selling laptops with ho-hum webcams.
Could just be cognitive bias though, since everyone complains about mac webcams all the time.
Even the cheapest Galaxy S phones have a better front-facing camera than a 2020 MacBook Pro. 720p is less than one megapixel. Other PC makers have the same problem. https://www.wsj.com/video/series/joanna-stern-personal-techn...
The only justification I can think of for having such a cheap webcam is that it takes less battery power to process low-res streaming video at lower frame rates.
I'm not in any way excusing the crappy hardware — my iPhone 6S should not be a better webcam than anything built-in or on the normal market now — but I think this is a pretty expected outcome of market forces reflecting buyers' priorities.
I think what we see is basically showing the difference between the phone and laptop markets: people buy new phones to get better cameras because that’s one of the most common activities for a phone but the same is not true for laptops (or at least wasn’t previously), and there’s a much lower threshold where a mediocre camera prevents a sale. That lack of pressure means there isn’t much of a check on either cost cutting or pursuit of thinner/lighter designs.
But ... my shiny new Lenovo Carbon X1, which is an engineering laptop if there ever was one, is developing key impressions all over it's very expensive 4K OLED screen because they didn't put enough space between the keyboard and the display when it is closed, presumably to keep the thing thin.
It ain't just Mr Ives.
Im not an AMD fan boy, all my last devices were Intel. I'm just curious.
- Mechanical build quality
- Choice of auxiliary components (wifi camera+chipset, etc.). If you're at a conference, you want to get connected and hook up to a projector reliably.
- Battery life
- Cooling
- Keyboard/pointer quality
- Size/weight
And so on. If you fly with a laptop once a week, whether the screws fall out from plane vibrations makes a difference.
One bad business trip, and you've covered the price delta of a half-dozen laptops. I'd never buy an over-speced, under-built laptop like the G5 SE. If my laptop is 15% slower, I care a lot less than if it's 15% more reliable.
My previous laptop was 4K. Sadly I discovered after I had it for a year or so 4K is addictive. It's hard to give up the screen real estate once your used to it. When it comes to 4K on Lenovo it's the X1 or nothing, and Dell's keyboards have pissed me off for the last time. I didn't look beyond Dell and Lenovo.
The OLED was a first and only available on the X1. It's lovely and all, the contrast ratio and max brightness are extraordinary. So extraordinary if I take the brightness beyond 10% or so in an office I can't look at it for long periods. It's also twice the price, and heaver on the battery. No huge regrets, as it is a truly beautiful screen, but I won't be doing it again.
All that said, those key marks on the beautiful OLED screen are really starting to piss me off.
Modern software handles high-res displays well. Things are sharper and crisper, not smaller.
A bulge at the back of the laptop would be way more problematic e.g. way more likely to catch on bags, or otherwise be damaged.
What I doubt most people would mind is the screen side being slightly thicker.
Why are phones allowed to have bulges and chins and notches, but laptops somehow are too "thin" to do the same? For that matter, why hasn't anyone made a laptop screen with a centre notch? people accepted that for phones and now every large manufacturer of phones use notches in their phones.
Laptops are much larger and heavier so it's really doable to include a better camera.
The only thing blocking isn't technical.
On laptops you can either create a bump on the backside of the lid, which looks weird as the use of it is not obvious, or you can extend the camera in the front and create a dent in the bottom shell, which also has no clear use and seems out of place. Either way, it will look and feel weird.
On phones it at least highlights the powerful camera and most users are not bothered by it as it extends into the phone case.
When the phone bumps and notches were first introduced it was plenty weird and ugly and obvious with no clear prediction of whether people will be bothered with it or not.
Obviously people are fine with it now.
If the market is a bit open minded with laptops, we can all have better webcams. Form follows function. If I can get a notched laptop with a great 4K laptop webcam, I couldn't care less that it has a weird notch.
It's a non-starter I'm afraid.
Everyone assumes that it's only the camera module that needs to be updated, but forgets that it's the image processing hardware circuits that make DSLRs and iOS devices produce such gorgeous images. This, in a nutshell, is why USB webcam makers can't compete: they aren't willing to raise their price by $50 to incorporate a real image processing chip that's able to handle the sensor adequately, and their software is crap because it's bargain-basement and hacked-together to avoid the hardware spend. Imagine if we could purchase Leica and Nikon and Canon webcams, with the ability to use DSLR controls to set them up, and then have them just produce gorgeous photos at any time. So far, Apple is the only webcam maker that's taken it far enough to earn praise. It's really unfortunate.
I generally disagree with your premise here. Yes, you can do some pretty amazing things with image processing in software, but you have to have a decent starting point. A good example of this is just how minimal the image processing improvements are in the M1 MacBooks compared to their Intel counterparts — marginally better, but nothing to write home about.
I’m not at all an expert in optics, but I would expect the biggest constraint is the available depth for the lens and camera sensor within the upper clamshell of a laptop vs a phone. It doesn’t seem like it would be a huge difference but an extra millimeter or so makes a huge difference in the size of the sensor that can be used.
I think that the iPhone/iPad camera package requires Apple Silicon, and that Apple simply hasn't installed it (or one like it) in their MacBook yet, so that it doesn't matter if it has Intel or Apple Silicon, it still looks terrible because it hasn't been upgrade to one that takes advantage of Apple Silicon yet.
I don't know who makes the sensor inside that package, but I have no assumptions that the sensor is the sum total of the package. Apple is all about bizarre integrations and coprocessors (such as the iOS/bridgeOS/whatever chip inside their Lightning-to-HDMI dongle) and I'm simply not willing to bet that the Apple Silicon package can operate on an Intel computer, or that it's just processing of the sensor, without a teardown showing us that they're the same in the face of a significant quality improvement.