I feel more and more companies should do this! My ThinkPad T480 has one built-in and I really like the peace of mind.

I guess Apple are going to say that they'd rather focus on the security of the OS and computer to prevent unauthorised software from being able to access the camera than on a mostly cosmetic doodad.

This is a tech forum. I'm much more embarrassed not being able to use Zoom for the first time, rather than a distributed team see me laying on a couch for a brief moment.

You people sound insecure about your appearance.

If we're talking about focusing on security, then the choice should be clear.

> All cameras after that one were different: The hardware team tied the LED to a hardware signal from the sensor: If the (I believe) vertical sync was active, the LED would light up. There is NO firmware control to disable/enable the LED. The actual firmware is indeed flashable, but the part is not a generic part and there are mechanisms in place to verify the image being flashed. […]

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2019/02/on_covering_webcams

[2] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/secbbd20b00b/...

The desired user experience is peace of mind from a physical barrier; no amount of LED bulb hidden behind the flush surface is going to solve for that.

It's also like the keyboard keys. User experience has taken a back seat to Apple's product design goals as they pertain to their bottom line. Products users love are expensive to build and maintain, so Apple won't make them. When you can't grow profits selling more devices, you start to cut corners on the ones you _are_ selling.

Sounds like engineering excellence to me.

But I agree with you that there should perhaps be some kind of physical block/switch built in.

I think engineering excellence would be to incorporate a camera cover and physical microphone switch while maintaining these tolerances.

People forget simply because camera covers are not common enough, so it's not a valid argument for why they shouldn't be more common.

Camera covers are just another example of security for show. Having a camera cover on a pc without a hard wired camera indicator like Macs have means you will never know how many of those times you were filmed after forgetting to slide your camera cover over.

I'm sorry, do you mean to say that only intelligence agency personnel are capable of remembering a simple habit such as sliding a camera cover? Not too long ago we were all using flip phones, many with extendable antennas, and no one was having trouble remembering to flip open their phone and extend the antenna before using it.

And as the sister comment said, no one suggested removing the LED indicator.

And yes, 90% of people aren’t going to remember to close the camera cover every time.

The LED indicator is all you need as long as its hardwired like Apples is.

> The LED indicator is all you need as long as its hardwired like Apple's is.

An LED indicator does nothing to stop someone from snooping.

A LED indicator makes snooping obvious, exposing them immediately. Someone snooping your spy camera needs to record hours upon hours of recording to find anything they can use to blackmail you with.

You still haven't switched tactics despite me demonstrating how it's an invalid argument. Not only do you have zero data to support this conjecture, but he camera cover is not there for the people who don't use it. It's there for the people who do use it.

It was a long time before seatbelts were legally mandated. That didn't stop the safety-conscious folk from wanting and using them.

I have friends now who never wear their seatbelt. Two years ago my oldest friend whom I've known since I was five was killed in an accident because he forgot to wear his seatbelt. Is the answer to take seatbelts back out because some people won't use them? Of course not. The answer is more seatbelt awareness campaigns from auto manufacturers.

The LED indicator is a bit like police, who respond to burglaries after they've happened, while a camera cover is the deadbolt which prevents the crime in the first place. Do you leave your house unlocked at night, too?

You clearly are arguing for argument's sake, and have no interest in actually considering what I am saying, just repeating the same tired points over and over again. I'm done here.

I enjoy the peace of mind and lack of a notch on my screen. It's designed and advertised as a feature, not an oversight.

Regardless, it's a feature I wanted and the engineering team catered to this desire, so I don't see how this is an oversight. Engineering is about trade-offs.

We really don't. Apple came up with the notch, everyone copies it and obsesses about edge-to-edge display, managing to implement it to very varying degrees of success.

> I think the only thing we should all be able to agree upon is that rounded screen edges make it extremely difficult to design a good phone case which protects from all angles.

I forget which phone I had with a display that went to the vertical edges, which were curved slightly. Damn thing was almost impossible to hold without it thinking I was trying to actually touch the screen on the edge. The best case I could find stopped that from happening, with a slight trade-off that I couldn't touch anything right on the edge of the screen (very rarely ever needed that)

The notch is a pretty stupid design decision and I'm not obsessing over it. I have this phone now because I went through four Google Pixels this year just trying to get one that wasn't defected out of the box. My current phone was a cheap sub-$400 flagship model with support from Paranoid Android meaning it has a much extended lifespan. It's not because I obsessed over an edge to edge display.

I didn't know about the touch-sensitive issue bc I've never purchased a phone with rounded screen edges. That sounds very frustrating.

Additional of all the people I know - friends, family, parents, children, etc., only one of those people use the camera on their laptop. Some use facetime on their phone. But even for the mac users, it's a complete rarity.

Fujifilm and Canon have added webcam support to their DSLRs though, which is interesting.

Then why did you make the claim? You're willing to say things without knowing their validity just for the sake of argument?

This is just detracting from the conversation without actually adding anything useful.

Yes. I believe this is the ideal way to post because it gives other people the pleasure of replying to you. It's a community service.