I mean, phone cameras will literally always be better than laptop cameras. They're just a lot bigger.
Edit: I should clarify this a little. From my understanding, camera quality is pretty overwhelmingly limited by lens quality. Better lenses require a thicker / deeper camera housing, which is hard to stuff into the top lid of a laptop. Phones are "always" (although that might not be true forever!) going to have more space for bigger and better lenses.
And that’s pretty annoying, a computer lid bump would snag into everything.
> And screens could be thicker where needed.
My phone’s thrice the thickness of my laptop’s lid.
This would increase the laptop’s thickness by a lot, and mostly by voids.
So if you have a bump on the inner side, you also need to have a notch in the topcase.
And unless you move the webcam something weird (an edge or below the screen), you need to have that notch through or below right below trackpad, which is less than optimally comfortable before you even consider that the accumulation of crap in that notch can then damage the camera lens.
Would it be so weird? I mean: top corner/edge is less of a problem than bottom (nostril+big hands)
Assymertic? let's go nuts: two webcams, one on each side... suddenly, no notch, double the amount of light, stereoscopic vision. Combine that with some software processing and probably two very cheap sensors could produce decent results without bumping the price as a thin and tiny high quality sensor would.
The camera quality is shit. Just garbage.
I don’t understand how they manage to do it. I understand your comment about laptop screens and it makes sense however none of the third party external webcams and even a non space constrained Apple webcam performs ok.
It’s weird.
It's suspected it's because they're using a wide angle and cropping it tight to do the Center Stage feature.
It's pretty astonishing just how much they managed to screw up that monitor's webcam, but it's known to be terrible.
Do they have to be?
Making them thicker means you're making them heavier and less rigid and full of nothing for 99% of their volume, making the entire laptop less wieldy (as it gets much thicker).
It also means the hinge can't go as far back as the lid is now in the way (forget laptops which sit open flush). Or you have to design a completely novel (and much more expensive, and faillible) hinge system which better supports a thicker lid e.g. the Surface Book's fulcrum hinge, except instead of that thicker lid being a computer it's just air, so you get nothing for that expense and inconvenience.
Or to keep the thermals totally on the bottom just move the GPU and CPU off the main board and put them underneath with the rest of the main board behind the LCD
This allows for a larger battery with more run time, better camera, and it should keep the balance of the machine while keeping hot stuff away from the LCD
There are options
Iirc that was one of the SB’s issues which the hinge had to manage.
And things would probably be worse for a lid filled with battery.
Its balance is quite good.
Are the gods of thin devices stopping engineers from doing something different?
What I didn't think about in my original comment is that their new solution makes use of two of the phones cameras (face view and the keyboard view)... I'm not sure consumers would be okay with THAT much hardware real estate being taken up by the addition of a wide angle lens (which is a really cool feature, albeit a bit is a gimmick for most). Though I'm sure Apple marketing could still make it generally desirable if they wanted to.
Exhibit A, this thread
They've been shifting design choices in a direction for years and this is what came of it. They could have made other choices but did not
It's only purpose is for the occasional video chat which, until recently, most people would use very rarely.
Sacrificing portability for camera quality in a laptop would very much fall under irrational.
Sony RX0.
The things with webcam is nobody want to spend any substantial amount of money on a third party usb webcam and nobody is willing to pay his laptop 10 or 20% more because it has a quality camera inside.