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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

In the feature list, the most underwhelming item to me is the '1080p FaceTime HD camera'.

Aren't pretty much all cameras at least 1080p by now? I'd expect a top of the line laptop to have a multi-megapixel camera able to push 240fps for slowmo and windowing abilities to allow software zoom while still outputting a high enough resolution feed that someone viewing on another macbook pro can't see the pixels (ie. more than 1080p please!).

Heck, on a top of the line macbook, you could even have cameras on each corner so that clever processing could be done to get multiple angles and automatically pretend to have a 2nd cameraman for closeups from another angle.

Can anyone provide insight why Apple didn't put more effort into cameras?

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> In the feature list, the most underwhelming item to me is the '1080p FaceTime HD camera'.

Why ?

Most people use their laptop webcams for Skype with friends or Zoom/Teams with colleagues. The camera is merely a means to display your face to others and I doubt anyone else (especially on work sessions) gives a shit about what your image looks like.

Do people really need to stare at your wrinkles, nose-hair and unshaven face in 8k ? Most people also use their webcam in godawful lighting conditions, so it matters even less.

Added to which, in relation to the MacBook Pros, the clue is in the name "Pro". People will be buying it as a work machine. Who cares about the webcam (or indeed, if you look at certain other web-forums where people are complaining about the lack of Space Gray 16-inch ...who cares about the colour !).

My understanding is that it's actually quite difficult to fit a high quality camera into a laptop lid. If you look at how thin the lid is you'll notice it's at least twice as thin as a cell phone.

Doesn't stop them using compound-eye like designs... They can be very thin and have 100+ 'cameras' over just a few square millimeters, all using the same CCD.

As a bonus, they (after a bit of processing) output 3d information, allowing them to use the same system for face ID etc.

There just isn’t much market for it. People don’t feel the need to project high res images showing every little flaw. The video conference services generally downscale the video to 1080/720 by default.

You can get up to 4K on external cameras or on a few desktop monitors with thick cases but those cameras are much too large for laptop cases.

Surely these are either much more expensive or much lower resolution though?

> Can anyone provide insight why Apple didn't put more effort into cameras?

I assume because for users who need more than a basic webcam, Apple has Continuity Camera¹². And of course there are lots of people at the high-end using DSLRs as their webcam.

¹ https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213244 ² https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209037

I use my phone for stuff. I don’t want to kill the battery and it’s usage as a webcam all day. Maybe that’s just me though, I’m in Zoom meetings all day.

Contrary opinion: I don't see the need for a high-quality camera on a laptop. I can't think of another good use besides Zoom calls and Facetime and the like, when your counterparties in the meeting are all going to be seeing a scaled-down image anyway.

Stick in some decent and cheap camera, and put the money into stuff that matters like computing capabilities, RAM, storage, networking, screen, etc.

Any use besides… one of the most common uses of the laptop in general in this remote-work era…

Right, and you don't need an ultra-HD camera for your face to appear in a small tile on someone else's remote screen.

Who says it's a small tile? It's common for me to have meetings where nobody is sharing screen. In a one-on-one meeting, someone's face might be taking up my entire screen as we talk.

Sometimes my team record short presentations or updates to each other to share in Slack and it's nice to be in higher quality. It's noticeable when someone is using a laptop camera or something else.

Until very recently, MacBooks were famously stuck with 720p webcams. So from that perspective 1080p is a feature worth mentioning

In any case, I personally don't really care how much fine detail my friends and coworkers can see when I'm talking with them. If I were a streamer or something I might care, but those people probably have dedicated hardware. I think for the average person 1080p is enough

I think any effort being put into laptop cameras these days (and for the last 5+ years) is to make them smaller in all dimensions.

I'm guessing companies have found that it's always a trade-off between camera quality and bezel size, and a thinner bezel impresses people more than a better camera.

I find Apple webcams perform better in video calls than most/all others, so they don't really have much to worry about. If you do want some insanely high quality "webcam", you could buy that magsafe gimmick they showed off last year that allows you to use your iPhone's back cameras as the webcam for your MacBook.

With the recent developments in real-time video upscaling, maybe higher resolution cameras will be made obsolete for video calls, the main use case of laptop cameras.

That's to upsell their new iPhone feature where you can use your iphone as your camera instead.

More seriously, there just isn't room in the 2-3mm thick screen to put a better camera and lens.

I'd also note that megapixels aren't everything. My nearly decade-old Logitech C920 will run circles around the webcam in any laptop webcam I've seen.

No idea why they don't just stick one of the iPhone cameras in there. Heck, use the last gen camera. If the camera isn't too big for the iphone then it's not too big for a laptop- especially with the notch.

iPhone cameras are absurdly thick compare to the thickness of a laptop lid. If you've noticed, they've also gotten even thicker over the year (the camera bump has gotten thicker). Nobody will want a laptop lid as thick as their iPhone + camera bump.

Even the front (selfie) camera?

Yeah. The back camera sits behind the screen whereas the front one pokes through it. I wouldn't be surprised if they were fairly even in terms of thickness.

My iPhone 14 Pro is at least twice as thick (not counting bump) as the MacBook lid and the selfie camera is only 4k@30/1080@60. Not sure if there is a clever way to pack the camera or not but it doesn't sound good at first check.

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