The microphone is located inside the left speaker grille anyways, so it would be terribly muffled in clamshell mode anyways.
Note this is in contrast to previous models where the microphone had a tiny hole on the left edge (next to USB-C ports) and it could be used in clamshell mode.
Which at first I thought felt like a downgrade... but the reality is that your laptop isn't usually in a good position for mic pickup when it's closed anyways -- people often keep it off to the side or something, under a monitor riser, etc. While the speaker grille location, being front-facing rather than side-facing, is far better for picking up voice when using the laptop normally. And that anybody using a mic in clamshell mode usually already has one in their webcam or AirPods or headset or a dedicated mic anyways.
The 2015 pro model i have is an absolute nightmare for the fan as the mic was picking up the noise of the fan and so the CPU was working overtime to cancel the noise leading to cascading fan and heat noise.
Ended up just disabling it completely permanently. Was a particularly bad design i think.
I recently got an M2 Macbook Pro to replace my 2017 Macbook Pro (with that awful keyboard and the touch bar), and my biggest take away is that I'm glad Jony Ive left. The new one is less "elegant", but it approaches and in some case exceeds "functional". It's crazy the number he did on the hardware designs at the end.
> The microphone is located inside the left speaker grille anyways, so it would be terribly muffled in clamshell mode anyways
I don't think the hardware disable is meant as a UX convenience ("let's always disable it in clamshell mode because it sounds terrible"), as that could have just been done in software. It's meant for people privacy-conscious people who want to see a closed laptop and be able to assume it's not recording.
Meanwhile, I'm looking at this throwaway aside in the article:
> (The camera isn’t disconnected in hardware, because its field of view is completely obstructed with the lid closed.)
and thinking to myself that somebody is going to figure out how to record audio given just the "completely obstructed" view of the camera.
There's a long history of attackers reliably detecting logging keys with audio using just inter-keystroke latency and some histograms, or easily figuring out PINs tapped out on a phone screen because the OS doesn't bother putting access to accelerometers or gyroscopes behind an app permission. Attackers get very creative, especially when they're told that something is "impossible".
Recording sound from a video-only device that has been covered, with no hardware modifications would be a really really neat trick! Using Van Eck phreaking against all sorts of hardware is fascinating to me. FM radio broadcast from how RAM gets accessed and things like that. Maybe noise in the camera sensor can be used to pick up noise from the microphone on the motherboard (which is where the microphone is on Apple Silicon devices). I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it seems highly unlikely given everything else in play.
> There's a long history of attackers reliably detecting logging keys with audio using just inter-keystroke latency and some histograms
I wrote some fiction about this. The cosmic microwave background is hiding an audio signal. It's the sound of a keyswitch. Humanity uses the radio astronomy equivalent of these techniques to discover which keystroke caused the big bang.
Note this is in contrast to previous models where the microphone had a tiny hole on the left edge (next to USB-C ports) and it could be used in clamshell mode.
Which at first I thought felt like a downgrade... but the reality is that your laptop isn't usually in a good position for mic pickup when it's closed anyways -- people often keep it off to the side or something, under a monitor riser, etc. While the speaker grille location, being front-facing rather than side-facing, is far better for picking up voice when using the laptop normally. And that anybody using a mic in clamshell mode usually already has one in their webcam or AirPods or headset or a dedicated mic anyways.
So all in all it seems to work out pretty well.