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Here's what really bugs me. It's clear Apple has good cameras, excellent even. And small. Yet, the camera in my $2000 Macbook Pro? Remarkably worse than even t
by tibbon 6y ago
Here's what really bugs me. It's clear Apple has good cameras, excellent even. And small.
Yet, the camera in my $2000 Macbook Pro? Remarkably worse than even the worse external webcam.
If they can throw an amazing camera in a phone, why can't they put a decent one in a laptop?
- diamondo25 6y agoI think because it has no room for the module. Cameras these days tend to bulge out of the case of the phone...
- redisman 6y agoGood optics need physical space that a super flat screen doesn't have (in depth). My Macbook screen is like 1/4th of the depth of my iPhone
- mfkp 6y agoIf people don't mind a bulge in their phone, I doubt they'd mind a camera bulge sticking out the back of their laptop.
- justwalt 6y agoThat sounds like something Apple would never do. Though I might have said the same thing about the camera notch on the iPhone.
- ourcat 6y agoI've always been amazed that Apple did the camera bulge. I'm quite sure that an iPhone not being able to lay flat on a table without wobbling would have caused Steve Jobs to throw it at whoever designed it.
- masklinn 6y ago> I've always been amazed that Apple did the camera bulge. At this point I can only assume they simply never managed to find a way to significantly improve the module while keeping things flush.
- Kliment 6y agoThen just make the whole thing a bit thicker so it's flat (and put in extra battery). The current solution is phenomenally ugly and annoying.
- anthony_romeo 6y agoWell, according to this random article I didn't fully read and just now searched for to justify the rest of my sentence's unfounded speculation (https://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-case-survey-2014-7?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-case-survey-2014-7?op...), the vast majority of phone users put cases around their phones, so perhaps the opinion is that the bulge is negligible at this point, and the pursuit of thinness is in part to accommodate users with cases.
- setr 6y agoThe problem is that if you assume case-usage in the design, then the whole thing about it being physically premium materials, smoothly rounded corners and such stops making sense -- you're going to shove it in rubber anyways. The only thing that matters then is the screen itself, and maybe the hardware buttons (eg volume controls)
- httpsterio 6y agoWhen something costs lore in dollars than it weights in grams, you can bet on me doing my best lot to break it. Phones are already pretty prone to breakage and they're easily fumbled as well. I enjoy the materials in my phone and I'd love to use it without a case, but when my phone bumped against a saltshaker and the glass back panel cracked, I felt miffed to pay 160 euros to have that replaced when a 10 euro case would've prevented any damage.
- acdha 6y agoJohnny Ives was obsessed with thinness - it’s the same problem which lead to the bad keyboards. Now they’ve been putting people who haven’t forgotten about usability in charge I would not be surprised if the next case design included a non-terrible webcam since it’s unlikely that anyone is going to stop video conferencing even if we do go back to the office.
- totalZero 6y agoJony Ive* Fair point, but Apple isn't the only company selling laptops with ho-hum webcams.
- spijdar 6y agoJust an anecdote, but I've always felt the webcams on macs I've used the past few years are worse than much cheaper Wintel PC webcams. Could just be cognitive bias though, since everyone complains about mac webcams all the time.
- yborg 6y agoCompany outfitted us with Dell Alienware m17 R3 laptops, an expensive gaming model that has built-in head tracking. The camera is a 720p with terrible image quality, worse than any Macbook. So no, I don't think Apple is below standard here.
- acdha 6y agoI think it’d be interesting to compare with equivalent price points. Does a $2500 PC have a better camera than a MacBook Pro or is it really more like everyone is skimping and Mac owners are just more vocal about expecting something closer to a mid-2010s iPhone?
- totalZero 6y ago> Does a $2500 PC have a better camera than a MacBook Pro Even the cheapest Galaxy S phones have a better front-facing camera than a 2020 MacBook Pro. 720p is less than one megapixel. Other PC makers have the same problem. https://www.wsj.com/video/series/joanna-stern-personal-technology/laptop-webcam-showdown-macbook-air-dell-xps-theyre-pretty-bad/415D393C-4320-442B-974D-1887E20C057F https://www.wsj.com/video/series/joanna-stern-personal-techn... The only justification I can think of for having such a cheap webcam is that it takes less battery power to process low-res streaming video at lower frame rates.
- masklinn 6y ago> I doubt they'd mind a camera bulge sticking out the back of their laptop. A bulge at the back of the laptop would be way more problematic e.g. way more likely to catch on bags, or otherwise be damaged. What I doubt most people would mind is the screen side being slightly thicker.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CodesInChaos 6y agoOr have a bulge on the front side of the screen and a corresponding mound on the keyboard side. While it conflicts with the touchpad, it could still be a worthwhile tradeoff.
- barkingcat 6y agoYah this precisely. Why are phones allowed to have bulges and chins and notches, but laptops somehow are too "thin" to do the same? For that matter, why hasn't anyone made a laptop screen with a centre notch? people accepted that for phones and now every large manufacturer of phones use notches in their phones. Laptops are much larger and heavier so it's really doable to include a better camera. The only thing blocking isn't technical.
- saurik 6y agoI mean, it's one thing to have a part of my phone that is 15% thicker than the rest, but it is another thing entirely to have a part of my laptop screen that is 400% thicker than the rest ;P.
- rozab 6y agoNobody buys a laptop for the webcam. That's why.
- Fnoord 6y agoExactly, it just has to be good enough. Same with front facing camera. What isn't good enough is Dell's XPS bottom camera.
- N3cr0ph4g1st 6y agoThe bottom camera has been gone for a year or two now
- solstice 6y agoAre you sure that that won't have begun to change after one year of pandemic-related Home-Office?
- nom 6y agoFor the bulges you have to consider that most people use phone cases, which gives the designers a bit more room. On laptops you can either create a bump on the backside of the lid, which looks weird as the use of it is not obvious, or you can extend the camera in the front and create a dent in the bottom shell, which also has no clear use and seems out of place. Either way, it will look and feel weird. On phones it at least highlights the powerful camera and most users are not bothered by it as it extends into the phone case.
- danmur 6y agoPretty annoying place for a bulge though, and it would be more disruptive on a laptop.
- TechBro8615 6y agoMaybe the camera could protrude from the screen and fit into a hole on the bottom of the case when folded. Would be pretty ugly though.
- samatman 6y agoMore than ugly, it would fill up with lint and gunk and prevent closing the laptop, perhaps even damaging the screen if the user applied force. It's a non-starter I'm afraid.
- vsskanth 6y agoThank you. Never thought of this. It all makes sense now.
- ravenstine 6y agoOr they could at least make a webcam add-on with a superior camera, but as far as I know they don't sell anything like that. Hell, make it possible to use an iPhone as a webcam!
- llampx 6y agoI remember the article linked recently where someone took apart an old Apple iSight and put in a Raspberry Pi + Camera into the housing. And it had fantastic image quality.
- bootlooped 6y agoSo rather than put a crappy camera in the phone, they expanded the volume to fit the camera. I wonder why that isn't something we see with laptops? You could have it bulge out of the back, or have some clever cutout below the trackpad and let it bulge out the front.
- u678u 6y agoThe other part is if you have a quality HD or better camera its a huge load to GPU and network which will chew your battery. Lower resolution is actually probably preferred if you could see the alternative.
- bootlooped 6y agoIt's not just resolution though. By every other measure of quality, webcams are mediocre. In the article, even before expanding the video test of the 4 different webcams, it's easy to see how poor some of them are in various ways.
- jbellis 6y agoThis doesn't pass the smell test. Laptop batteries are effectively infinite compared to a phone.
- u678u 6y agoGood point. Maybe ARM chips are different and M1 will change things.
- floatingatoll 6y agoThe camera in your MBP isn't the Apple Silicon camera that's used in their mobile devices. In the near future, when Apple drops Intel from their entire laptop product line, it is very likely that they'll bring their Apple Silicon cameras from their mobile products to their laptop products. (Yes, there's a 'version zero' MBP with the M1, and a teardown showed that it's literally a drop-and-swap of the motherboard with no other component changes at all. It's literally the "get this out the door so that developers can start finding issues so we can fix them for the masses" model. Hope y'all waited to upgrade if you're not developers for Apple products!) Everyone assumes that it's only the camera module that needs to be updated, but forgets that it's the image processing hardware circuits that make DSLRs and iOS devices produce such gorgeous images. This, in a nutshell, is why USB webcam makers can't compete: they aren't willing to raise their price by $50 to incorporate a real image processing chip that's able to handle the sensor adequately, and their software is crap because it's bargain-basement and hacked-together to avoid the hardware spend. Imagine if we could purchase Leica and Nikon and Canon webcams, with the ability to use DSLR controls to set them up, and then have them just produce gorgeous photos at any time. So far, Apple is the only webcam maker that's taken it far enough to earn praise. It's really unfortunate.
- kelchm 6y agoApple aren’t actually designing its own sensors, are they? I expected they would be using an off the shelf Sony sensor just like (most) everyone else. I generally disagree with your premise here. Yes, you can do some pretty amazing things with image processing in software, but you have to have a decent starting point. A good example of this is just how minimal the image processing improvements are in the M1 MacBooks compared to their Intel counterparts — marginally better, but nothing to write home about. I’m not at all an expert in optics, but I would expect the biggest constraint is the available depth for the lens and camera sensor within the upper clamshell of a laptop vs a phone. It doesn’t seem like it would be a huge difference but an extra millimeter or so makes a huge difference in the size of the sensor that can be used.
- floatingatoll 6y agoYou assume that this year's M1 MacBooks have a different camera package from the Intel MacBooks prior to them, and/or that the camera package used in Intel MacBooks could be improved by Apple Silicon. I think that the iPhone/iPad camera package requires Apple Silicon, and that Apple simply hasn't installed it (or one like it) in their MacBook yet, so that it doesn't matter if it has Intel or Apple Silicon, it still looks terrible because it hasn't been upgrade to one that takes advantage of Apple Silicon yet. I don't know who makes the sensor inside that package, but I have no assumptions that the sensor is the sum total of the package. Apple is all about bizarre integrations and coprocessors (such as the iOS/bridgeOS/whatever chip inside their Lightning-to-HDMI dongle) and I'm simply not willing to bet that the Apple Silicon package can operate on an Intel computer, or that it's just processing of the sensor, without a teardown showing us that they're the same in the face of a significant quality improvement.
- JoeyBananas 6y agoIn a laptop, the camera is a much less important feature. Nobody takes pictures of their daughter's recital using a laptop.
- sneak 6y agoSpace. Your laptop lid is extremely thin. It's a marvel that it works as well as it does, given this constraint.