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Comment by cagenut | Hacker News Reader

i'm always astonished at how little anything got better despite the intensely escalated demands. web cams didnt get (much) better. most people's jobs didn't get them good mics. widespread understanding or adoption of latency's impact on conversation flow didn't become common knowledge. hybrid setups with some people on videoconf and some people in the office are still steaming hot garbage everywhere i've ever worked (yes cisco has some cool stuff but basically nobody leans into it).

Its like in the standoff over remote vs in-office everything got frozen in place.

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Continuity camera for people with a Mac and an iPhone is an enormous upgrade in visual quality. You can even apply effects like Portrait Lighting, center stage, and portrait mode. I frequently talk from places with iffy lighting and built in webcams just can’t handle the lower light like iPhone cameras can.

Unfortunately Continuity Camera requires both devices to be logged-in to the same iCloud account which is a no-go in many large corporate environments.

The camera is good, but the execution is extremely un-Apple to me. It looks really not slick from a hardware stand of point. They don’t even have an official mount. Just put a good (AI) camera in the laptop.

> [W]eb cams didn[']t get (much) better.

I wonder if improving webcams came on laptop manufacturers' roadmaps when video-conferencing became a big thing (i.e. because of COVID-WfH), for years they seemed to be mostly a "add the cheapest webcam and tick a box in the features list" item.

Apple seemed to have noticed. The newer MacBooks have better webcams.

I suspect that much of the use for work was using pre-pandemic, or hardware purchased at the beginning of the pandemic. It takes years for a hardware update wave to soak in to the general user base.

Opal is quite good, as webcam hardware goes. Still a ways to go on the software, but this sort of thing takes time.

iOS phone-as-camera is exceptionally good, but if you need your phone during a meeting, that’s not so great.

> iOS phone-as-camera is exceptionally good, but if you need your phone during a meeting, that’s not so great.

Which kinda confirms the point doesn't it? Even the iPhone company failed to put a decent camera into their 4000$+ laptops. It's utterly baffling how awful the 16" M1 camera is in comparison to even cheap Logitech external ones.

Opal without the software is not great at all. Very bad lighting. They should’ve had much better firmware instead of software imho.

I might agree with you over a relatively short time frame, but it sure feels like we came a long way since trying to get multicast to work or getting more than 5 people into a session.

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