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.