Is it just me, or should the front facing camera be better then 1080p by now?
It’s nice to shoot in 4K for flexibility of cropping etc later. But for me, I decided to save money this year. And I’m happy with my decision.
So for a video call camera, personally I think 1080p is totally sufficient.
AMD chips would have failed if they had used them too - that was the era of "baking your GPU" due to failed solder bumps and that definitely applied to AMD too, Apple is just such a clientzilla that they demanded payment for an industry-wide problem caused by the switch to RoHS-compliant solders. I think it's much more about control - CUDA is a third-party ecosystem that Apple doesn't want its clients getting dependent on, because then that would constrain apple's choices in hardware. Nobody locks in Apple's clients except Apple.
Reducing the size of electronics has always been a goal for consumer hardware companies. Look no further than the memory stick which now supports tens and hundreds of gigabytes on a piece of metal smaller than your finger nail.
It's quite nice having devices that have such small profiles. It's the result of incredible engineering to fit more power in a smaller space for really very few tradeoffs.
I would think the M1s are more than fast enough to do a nice job downsampling in real time from 4K to 1080p.
Also, the M1s are fast enough to be someone's main computer for a long, long time. 4K future proofs your system a little more.
A lot of Youtubers are not streaming, which is what most people use their laptop webcams for.
> I would think the M1s are more than fast enough to do a nice job downsampling in real time from 4K to 1080p.
Just video encoding a 1080p stream in itself is already extremely intensive even for high-end CPUs. Especially considering that I (like most users) am simply trying to take a call, and have actual work already going on that I want my processor to spend its time on.
4K downsampled to 1080p looks a lot better than a 1080p "native" sensor.
Are you asking why is it important to have a good camera for online video conferencing? Look at all the guides that teach people how to use DSLRs as their webcams.
That's not a problem, since Zoom and co don't stream in higher resolutions anyway, and even 720p will be highly compressed
We are talking here about the average person's use-case
Using resolution as a shorthand for actual image quality doesn't reflect the reality of how cameras work, never mind that full HD already pushes the limits of most people's streaming capabilities (both video encoding and bandwidth).