Plenty of Mac users with a logitech as well ;-) works just fine.

It may work fine, but its slightly absurd to need a better webcam for a recently made 2k USD laptop

Few if any laptops have decent cameras. This is partially because until recently most users didn't actually care that much, but also for practical reasons; modern laptops have very slim lids, so you can't really fit decent optics (a phone is a good bit deeper).

Thanks for pointing out the size - didn't quite think about just how much thinner lids are than phones. That is certainly a very real limiter

For comparison, the MacBook Air has about 2-3mm of usable space in the lid for optics + sensor. The iPhone has something like 7 or 8mm. For lens design and the ability to have a very slightly larger sensor, that's a huge difference.

> modern laptops have very slim lids, so you can't really fit decent optics (a phone is a good bit deeper).

What about the iMac?

What are you talking about? My $3k Dell, and $3k Lenovo have horrible cameras.

It seems like you own a lot of expensive laptops.

You realize where you're posting, right?

Work in IT long enough and it's not hard to use a lot of hardware:)

And that's even more absurd

Right, but having an integrated camera that is absolutely awful completely defeats the point of having that there in the first place. It really noticeable when you Facetime with someone on an iPhone and you compare the video quality of the two.

> having an integrated camera that is absolutely awful completely defeats the point of having that there in the first place

This is a ridiculous statement considering the camera we're talking about is 720p. The current camera is indeed better than "no integrated camera at all" and is perfectly fine for video calls with your family, or even for work, since you're probably sharing your screen and your coworkers don't need to see every pore on your face.

Which is riddiculous, because if they can fit good front camera in iPhone they should be able to do that in the much bigger device, like laptop, right?

Probably not, at least for the laptops. The phone is a lot thicker than a laptop lid.

I'm sure they can, but for some reason they didn't. It's fun to speculate, but apply Hanlon's Razor and Occam's Razor; it's unlikely there is some evil corporate scheme at play, and it's highly likely that the reason is very simple.

Perhaps they never got the levels of feedback that drove them to upgrade it. Perhaps it has to do with internal designs of using an USB 2.0 bus or something that now has to be changed to a CSI or MIPI style interface that first has to be processed by something like the T2 before it is a readable data stream for the standard Intel architecture.

They probably won't be able to fit the exact same iPhone module, the optics (Be it plastic or glass lenses) are too deep, but you could probably do with a better sensor for sure. Some manufacturers tried to 'fix' this by putting the camera below the screen which gives it a bit more space because you can then use the hinge area for the components; but now you end up looking at someone's chin all the time.

We simply don't know.

An iPhone is much deeper than a laptop lid. Perhaps they'll have to redesign the lid not to taper at the edge to provide more space for a better camera.

Or instead, use multiple tiny crappy cameras plus software to interpolate a good picture out of them.

yep!

The camera on my iMac Pro is better then the Logitech C920 I was using with my older Trash can Mac Pro. I have a much better mic that I use so not sure about the built in Mic on the iMac Prov

The original Apple FireWire webcam was very good, with a large, motorized lens. Despite boasting higher resolution, I doubt many modern webcams are as good, especially integrated ones.

You can still judge the macbook cameras by looking at the images they deliver. They're bad, really bad. I suspect that apple's laptop guru / team moved to iPhone and never got backfilled, leaving the macbooks with budget flat cameras from 2007 or something.

High quality cameras have been around since ~2015 even on midrange smartphones. Why can't laptops get one of those? Is there a supply issue?

Compare the thickness of the lid of your laptop to that of your phone.

There is your answer - Physics is a harsh mistress!

I doubt there's a good reason. That's why I'm considering bad reasons like "it fell through bureaucratic floor-cracks."

I had that camera. It was better than its contemporaries, but definitely not as good as even the mediocre built-in cameras today.

Here's an article with screenshots: https://www.macworld.com/article/3018431/in-praise-of-the-gl...

How awesome would an updated iSight be today? You could fit an APC-C sized sensor (1.6x crop DSLR) with a 22mm f/2 pancake lens for some insane bokeh. Probably at around the $300 price point. Sure would be easier than hooking a "clean HDMI" DSLR or mirrorless into a HDMI input/USB adaptor...

Especially if the camera could compress the stream in-body so you don't have to blow up your CPU/GPU to get a good 60fps HD video signal like you do using a mirrorless/DSLR.

IMO YMMV etc but wide lens distortion can drag down what people would call “image quality”. 50 or 85 would work better for portraits if you can afford the distance.