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.
There'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.
Would it be so weird? I mean: top corner/edge is less of a problem than bottom (nostril+big hands)
Assymertic? let's go nuts: two webcams, one on each side... suddenly, no notch, double the amount of light, stereoscopic vision. Combine that with some software processing and probably two very cheap sensors could produce decent results without bumping the price as a thin and tiny high quality sensor would.
I have an Apple studio display. That thing is pretty new, thick and has an A something chip running iOS inside.
The camera quality is shit. Just garbage.
I don’t understand how they manage to do it. I understand your comment about laptop screens and it makes sense however none of the third party external webcams and even a non space constrained Apple webcam performs ok.
If 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.
They naturally are because there's just not much there, it's just an LCD.
Making them thicker means you're making them heavier and less rigid and full of nothing for 99% of their volume, making the entire laptop less wieldy (as it gets much thicker).
It also means the hinge can't go as far back as the lid is now in the way (forget laptops which sit open flush). Or you have to design a completely novel (and much more expensive, and faillible) hinge system which better supports a thicker lid e.g. the Surface Book's fulcrum hinge, except instead of that thicker lid being a computer it's just air, so you get nothing for that expense and inconvenience.
Hm. Interesting: you could put the battery in the screen making it quite a bit thicker, and then have the base thinner, that would change the balance though and it might not be as stable when sitting open on a desk. It'd be great to have a 20 hour life laptop though.
Or we could rearrange cooling so fans stay on the bottom of the machine with heat pipes leading up to behind the screen where the main board is
Or to keep the thermals totally on the bottom just move the GPU and CPU off the main board and put them underneath with the rest of the main board behind the LCD
This allows for a larger battery with more run time, better camera, and it should keep the balance of the machine while keeping hot stuff away from the LCD
Laptop "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.
I'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?
Apple 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.
Designing 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.
A 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
> 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.
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.