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People with self-inflated importance.

I usually do most meetings from the beach with mobile phone, which does have a better camera than the MBP/MBA FWIW.
You just described me...

[BTW, I like the idea of being on a beach, but at the moment the air temperature on the local beach is around +1 °C (34 °F) and wind around 15 m/s (90,000 furlongs/fortnight or 250 toes/s). I have yet to find suitable gloves for keyboard work and a waterproof MB.]

My usual WFH day contains two to four video conferences, up to eight hours total. There are board meetings, investor meetings, customer meetings, webinars or panels, and luckily some technical meetings, as well. Many meetings are with people I know well, and then I may even switch off the cam sometimes. But when I am presenting something in front of people who do not know me well, I want to look attentive and concentrated, have good illumination, nice background, decent image quality and high audio quality. However silly it sounds, it helps getting the message through.
 
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They did not change camera because the wole LCD panel and possibly enclosure were redesigned getting MiniLED panel with FaceID FHD camera and we will see updated products from today presentation on Mid 2021 together with redesigned iMac. Like I wrote earlier here on MacRumors - this debut does not make any sense without new backlit panel technology. With these wide ancient LCD bezels new MBA and MBP still look outdated. Also on Mid 2021 we should see 3:2 ratio 14" panel on MBP. MBA will be possibly obsoleted since there is no any sense to have two models that does not differ so much. MBP 14" might get MBA enclosure to be less heavy and more handy. So Mid 2021: new redesigned iMac on ARM Silicon with MiniLED, MBP 14" 3:2 on improved M1 (without initial hardware anomalies), MBP 16" on ARM Silicon with MiniLED display. There is small chance that MBA will be presented on Fall 2021 or 2022 so Apple will use a patent so there will be no physical keyboard and thus new MBA will be again a market leader ultrabook light as a notepad (idea of two sheets of paper- they can use rigid flex rigid technology here).
 
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Pixelated blurry zoom meetings are all the rage, its that retro 2005 youtube vibe.
 
For everyone complaining about Apple continuing to use only a 720p camera in their MacBook laptops, I would like to remind people that the resolution of the camera alone does not indicate better or worse image quality in an of itself. A 720p camera can be nearly as good at the typical screen sizes used on laptop, tablet, or smartphone as a 1080p camera if the latter used better signal processing, a better lens, etc then the latter. There is nothing about a 720p internal laptop camera, especially when combined with the modern advanced processing of the image coming from the camera that Apple is capable of, that would indicate that it will be “crappy”, ”less then adequate”, or whatever. I am currently looking at a 720p DTV channel coming in over the air on my TV that looks perfectly fine at the distances I am viewing it at. Given that Apple laptop screens just aren’t that big compared to the typical modern flatscreen TV’s, I can’t see why Apple can’t give you a more the adequate image from the internal webcamS on their new MacBook laptops with aI’d of the M1 chip and such. Hopefully no one is using the internal webcam in place a dedicated external video camera for shooting say HD Youtube vids, for example. This is mostly for video conferencing (FaceTime, Zoom, Skype, etc.).
 
Serious question, what possible reason or technological limitation could they have had for not improving the camera?
They're gonna wait until 2nd or 3rd gen and then add FaceID tech. Then everybody who's defending 720p will suddenly want the 1080p camera. Like how widgets JUST got added even tho my Samsung Vibrant had it in 2010.

Covid, may, however change it to next year for an upgrade. Especially when folks are demanding better WFH cameras.
 
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I really thought we were getting a true redesign with iPhone/iPad like features; Face ID, 1080p web cam, 5G built in, and yes, touch screen. I know that's 'dreaming', but I guess I expected too much for something as MONUMENTAL MEGA TON as apple has pushed these products to be. I thought 'one more thing' really was signifying something new. And yes, I do fully acknowledge that apple's processors in and of themselves are extraordinary. But frankly, at the consumer level, there's not a lot of performance gains needed. And at the professional level, these machines can't compete yet.
 
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This entire line up is for kids and old folks. They're pure consumables only laptops and a poor excuse for a Mac mini all knee capped at 16GB RAM max. Just sad. Really, just sad.

They can't show Adobe Photoshop because the claim of Up To 15x Machine Learning would be more like Up To 1.5x more Machine Learning in Photoshop, if that. Pixelmator being the app is embarrassing. It's an extremely lightweight product. You couldn't use Affinity Photo because it would show it's got a long way to go.

As a Pixelmator, Affinity Suite, Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro X user all the legalese ambiguous language and claims is disappointing. The up to 3.5x faster LPX--sure with Apple LPX stock plugins included with LPX. Same for FCPX. None of this is helpful as professionals don't use those plugins when industry leading OEMs have far superior offerings. You don't make grammy winning music using Apple's Compressors/Limiters/EQs, etc. You use Fabfilters, iZotope offerings, etc., hardware Comp/Reverb/Limiters, Universal Audio plugins, etc. You don't use LPX's Vocal configs, guitar configs, etc., you use third party plugins alone that cost more than the cost of Logic Pro X. You have a $3200 Avalon VT-737sp for a Channel Strip into a Neumann U87ai, you have thousands of dollars invested in Native Instrument gear and third party Orchestral packages, synth packages, etc.

When one has tens of thousands of dollars invested in a recording studio you want to know professional equipment will be coming downstream and right now this is nowhere near that level.

You can invest in a Mac Pro now, leverage 28 cores, add an Afterburner card and GPGPUs and have up to $50k or third party OWC RAM still a pretty penny and amortize it over the next five years only to come back in five years and discover Apple has phased out the professional lines they said five years earlier they're all in on, so however ``cute'' this introduction is for the consumer space, there should be a one more thing informercial at least on what their plans are for the iMac and Mac Pro lines.

And no these aren't the world's fastest CPU cores. No matter what he claims in the video. Hardware verified secure boot blocks out this hardware for anything other than macOS and thus turns expensive future hardware into just plain art.

We got nothing but a large infomercial for the casual computer user. A+ on that. Professionals are left wondering what their future options will be.
 
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Customers: Please add better camera

Apple: Better not spend $.50 on a camera and create a new processor instead, designed for nothing but ML. Then optimize the hell out of it and improve camera quality by 2-5% depending on conditions.
 
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You cannot make the camera a significant higher resolution due to the limited physical dimensions available. Physics is not on your side to get better ones.

Higher resolution means more pixels, but those cannot be shrunk without them generating much more noise.
Which means the size of the sensor has to get bigger (not a huge problem in itself), but that means you also need a bigger lens and that automatically means more space in the thickness on the screen.
Remember those iPhone having that "bump" where the camera is ... same reason here: there's simply not enough room.


So what apple did is try to offset the physical limitations on the hardware by adding software processing using their Machine Learning engine in the M1 to remove some of the limitations the hardware has.

Proof in the pudding is eating it ... let's wait to see footage and not judge it from a spec sheet. Although I am very sceptical of software "adding" stuff to an image.
 
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Serious question, what possible reason or technological limitation could they have had for not improving the camera?
Physics.
Thickness of the lid (or lack of it) means you need an extremely tiny lens. Which in turn means the physical size of the sensor needs to be equally tiny. But you cannot make pixels of a camera smaller without generating much more noise on that sensor. There's a reason an iPad and a iPhone have that bump were the camera sits: it's needed for the lenses.
 
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Physics.
Thickness of the lid (or lack of it) means you need an extremely tiny lens. Which in turn means the physical size of the sensor needs to be equally tiny. But you cannot make pixels of a camera smaller without generating much more noise on that sensor. There's a reason an iPad and a iPhone have that bump were the camera sits: it's needed for the lenses.
Please stop making excuses for this. There is literally no excuse for a 720p webcam to be on any device in 2020, especially ones that are this expensive. Please ... for all that is good in the world ... just stop ... stop deluding yourself ... and stop nonsensing everyone. It's really quite enough.
 
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Please stop making excuses for this. There is literally no excuse for a 720p webcam to be on any device in 2020, especially ones that are this expensive. Please ... for all that is good in the world ... just stop ... stop deluding yourself ... and stop nonsensing everyone. It's really quite enough.
you're ignoring the facts. a 1080p sensor of the same size would do *WORSE* than a 720p of the same size indoors. please educate yourself on this subject. you're being brainwashed by pixel count.
 
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My suggestion to Apple is to toss the PoS called webcam. Instead, Apple should create the necessary SW for using iPhones and iPads as webcams. Their image quality is better than that of any reasonably priced webcam. (Yes, I have EpocCam Pro, but it has not proven to be too reliable in long meetings.)
I wouldn't throw away the webcam. Having quick calls without setting up my iPhone is absolutely essential.

However, I agree Apple (of all tech players) should easily be able to implement a seamless software iPhone cam solution.
 
I would like to see the entire FaceID module from the iPhone in the MacBook but my understanding is that it is too large to fit in the lid of the MacBook. So the iMac is the best computer for them to try this in.
 
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