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Great, because I never want to use my phone while in a meeting What the actual fuck are they thinking just use a decent cam in the laptop But yea, mic audio i
by feet 4y ago
Great, because I never want to use my phone while in a meeting
What the actual fuck are they thinking just use a decent cam in the laptop
But yea, mic audio is always trash too
- ketzo 4y ago> just use a decent cam in the laptop I mean, phone cameras will literally always be better than laptop cameras. They're just a lot bigger. Edit: I should clarify this a little. From my understanding, camera quality is pretty overwhelmingly limited by lens quality. Better lenses require a thicker / deeper camera housing, which is hard to stuff into the top lid of a laptop. Phones are "always" (although that might not be true forever!) going to have more space for bigger and better lenses.
- OJFord 4y agoWhy does that mean 'always'? i.e. rephrase GP you quoted: 'just use a lot bigger of a cam in the laptop'.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- davidmurdoch 4y agoWhat a curious take. They just need to put bigger cameras in the laptop. There is like 100x more space for such things.
- gbanfalvi 4y agoNot depthwise.
- davidmurdoch 4y agoNeither are phones with great cameras... Which is why there are camera bumps.
- feet 4y agoA camera bump could easily be added and with a redesign of the palm rest/touch pad area there could be a recess or slight curve down to fit, you're absolutely right
- fwoty 4y agoNobody is buying a laptop with a bump at the top of the lid
- davidmurdoch 4y agoYet
- dewey 4y agoLaptop "lids" are a lot thinner than your average phone, they might be able to use a plateau like at the back of the phones to house it but I'd guess if there would be a simple solution that they could "just" do it would've happened already.
- feet 4y agoOkay? So change it? Are the gods of thin devices stopping engineers from doing something different?
- dewey 4y agoI'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying that it's not a "just" drop-in replacement that you can do from one day to the next. Don't you think they would've done that instead of engineering some ugly phone holder solution for the new Continuity camera?
- feet 4y agoNo, I definitely don't expect apple to make rational design choices at this point Exhibit A, this thread They've been shifting design choices in a direction for years and this is what came of it. They could have made other choices but did not
- lkjdsklf 4y agoDesigning a laptop by sacrificing portability for camera quality is absolutely not rational design. No one is walking around taking photos with their macbook. It's only purpose is for the occasional video chat which, until recently, most people would use very rarely. Sacrificing portability for camera quality in a laptop would very much fall under irrational.
- davidmurdoch 4y agoApple is always searching for ways to get consumers to buy more of their hardware, so this does seem like a great way of entrenching users a little bit more. What I didn't think about in my original comment is that their new solution makes use of two of the phones cameras (face view and the keyboard view)... I'm not sure consumers would be okay with THAT much hardware real estate being taken up by the addition of a wide angle lens (which is a really cool feature, albeit a bit is a gimmick for most). Though I'm sure Apple marketing could still make it generally desirable if they wanted to.
- jacquesm 4y agoLaptop screens are much thinner than phones are thick so a phone actually has more space for the camera in the dimension that is most restricted.
- davidmurdoch 4y agoPhones have camera bumps. And screens could be thicker where needed.
- masklinn 4y ago> Phones have camera bumps. And that’s pretty annoying, a computer lid bump would snag into everything. > And screens could be thicker where needed. My phone’s thrice the thickness of my laptop’s lid. This would increase the laptop’s thickness by a lot, and mostly by voids.
- davidmurdoch 4y agoThe bump would go towards the keyboard, I'd think.
- masklinn 4y agoThere's very little clearance in that direction, and the clearance which there is is necessary for the screen / lens not to touch the keyboard / case and get scratched. So if you have a bump on the inner side, you also need to have a notch in the topcase. And unless you move the webcam something weird (an edge or below the screen), you need to have that notch through or below right below trackpad, which is less than optimally comfortable before you even consider that the accumulation of crap in that notch can then damage the camera lens.
- alexb_ 4y agoIf Apple released a notch in the bottom side of their macbooks for a camera bump to fit in, everyone would be calling them visionary geniuses and they would use it to jack up the price 200 dollars more.
- Forgeties79 4y agoEhhh it’s not quite that simple. Optics and sensors have requirements that screen builds clash with. You’d need to make them thicker, for starters.
- prmoustache 4y ago> I mean, phone cameras will literally always be better than laptop cameras. They're just a lot bigger. Sony RX0. The things with webcam is nobody want to spend any substantial amount of money on a third party usb webcam and nobody is willing to pay his laptop 10 or 20% more because it has a quality camera inside.
- nawgz 4y agoBetter to use the browser anyways, your eyes don’t divert from the screen this way. Much more subtle
- nojito 4y ago>What the actual fuck are they thinking just use a decent cam in the laptop It will actually almost double the weight of the overall laptop if they added the same camera as they do on iPhone.
- feet 4y ago
- Jcowell 4y agoI think he means in order to fit a camera you need to increase the thickness of the laptops lid. Whether or not this leads to double the weight , idk but there is definitely a weight increase to fit the camera.
- feet 4y agoIf they did mean it that way it still doesn't make sense to me. Where is the extra mass coming from? Are they just thickening the whole lid and fill it with solid lead? Mass comes from matter, if there isn't matter than there isn't mass. Adding a tiny camera, even if they did have to increase thickness a tiny bit of the entire lid it still wouldn't even come close to doubling the mass of the whole thing on an aluminum body laptop
- nojito 4y agoIt's simple math. To hold the camera housing of an iPhone camera the thickness has to go up which means the entire top lid needs to become thicker. This will easily double the weight of the laptop.
- blacksmith_tb 4y agoOnly if that means using twice as much metal - I would expect instead it'd mean adding a thin strip of metal around the circumference of the lid. That would add a few grams, I'm sure, but hardly doubling.
- dangus 4y agoThe 1080p laptop webcam that's in Apple's latest models is quite a decent camera that benefits from the ISP in Apple silicon. Even the ancient 720p camera hooked up to that ISP managed an incredible amount of improvement over the Intel models. I'd also venture a guess that many other laptops' built-in webcams can outperform some of these dedicated units, not just the ones that are Apple's iPhone R&D beneficiaries. "Mic audio is always trash" – again, try a newer Mac notebook model. Apple has been investing serious R&D into laptop microphones, and I think competitors are taking notice and making their own improvements. It might sound crazy to buy a second phone for this kind of thing, but I do think there are people who will get a better value out of actually just buying a second iPhone as a webcam/streaming camera compared to buying a dedicated professional camera. Unlike a mirrorless/DLSR camera, you can also acquire smartphones with deep carrier discounts and long, zero interest financing. So, presumably, you could buy yourself a new phone, and instead of trading in your old one you could use that as a streaming webcam. Don't forget that iPhones aren't just $1000 luxury phones, Apple's cheapest new model is $429 and will stomp all over any dedicated webcam on this list. If you jump on the used market you can buy something like an iPhone 11 or XR for under $300 or $200 and still have a really solid webcam (as a bonus, you don't have to care about the condition of the battery).
- jsdwarf 4y agoInternal cams in laptops are considered commodities by the laptop manufacturers: they need to put any HD webcam in their product or no customer will buy it, but nobody picks a laptop model just because it has an excellent webcam.
- interactivecode 4y agowho would they know, no manufacturer recently actually released something with an excellent webcam
- googlryas 4y agoWhy does this make you so angry? Laptops rarely have decent cams, because phones are afforded a greater thickness than the typical location of a laptop camera(above the screen). The webcam in my macbook has about 1/8" to work with, whereas my phone camera has almost 1/3"
- Shorel 4y agoExternal cameras like the Logitech 920 tested in the article have more than enough thickness to have better optics and better electronics than the cameras in phones. They just don't.
- Forgeties79 4y ago>they just don’t Maybe this is out of ignorance, but just sort of assumed that’s how they keep it so cheap. Also the cameras on phones are arguably why people buy the phones they do at this point, or at the very least it’s a huge consideration given how frequently we use them. They also aren’t just for selfies and FaceTime or what have you, they’re also meant to be photography tools. They’ve completely replaced small consumer point and shoots. A laptop camera/webcam isn’t and can’t be that.