Yeah, that's very annoying.
Zoom, for example, will tell you, when you are muted and you begin to speak. It's a very nice thing.
I have a microphone (that wasn't expensive) that has a hardware mute. I use it when I really want to make sure I'm not heard, even for "speaking" detection.
MS Teams has that feature too.
TBH I'm not surprised: when you mute the mic in an app, you're still letting the app in control. If you really want to be safe, you need to mute at OS level or in hardware. That's why cameras have a hardware cover in modern laptops.
> How about we not make the default that companies can do whatever they want and users have to take steps like a hardware-muted mic (which isn't always an option) to ensure a basic expectation of privacy?
Sounds nice on the surface, but is ultimately silly. Sure, it'd be nice if everyone did the right thing, but you can never guarantee that, and hence if you really care you need to perform the mute at a lower level than what the app has access to.
And the increasingly (or is it just perceived?) shady behavior of big companies are not helping.
I am afraid this eludes our leaders across the board.
It would be so nice to have a mute-mic button which lights up when muted.
Most of the actions just duplicated existing UI elements.
So when you go to the deck to perform an action, you mentally context switch away from the keyboard, so your brain is looking for different clues.
So even with a touch bar + function keys, the function keys stay in keyboard context, but the touch bar requires that switch in any case. Maybe taking your eyes to the touch bar is enough of a context switch, mentally.
The problem was that it was too much of a tradeoff. Either a touch bar or function keys. I need function keys. The touch bar was useless for this purpose (no tactile feel).
Apple could easily have done both. There's more than enough space even on the 13" macbooks. It would have taken a bit of space from the vertical range of the touchpad but it's already comically large anyway.
I carefully made sure I didn't mention the touch bar. I waited until 2022 to finally be able to buy a MBP without a touchbar (and with magsafe charger).
I would very much like a physical button with a reassuring tactile feeling to it. Like the mute button on the function keys row.
The mic mute button of course works at the OS level but still...
Zoom was discussed 2 months ago in "Why is the Zoom app listening on my microphone when not in a meeting?"