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Comment by easde | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, they're not thin compared to a laptop lid. Especially with the taper near the edges that Macbooks and many other high-end laptops have. There are some exotic optical solutions out there that allow for thinner lenses but I doubt we'll see those in laptops anytime soon.

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Cameras are also a really big deal in the context of smartphones. I assume a lot of silicon is devoted to making them work well with a small sensor in a smallish footprint. Apple is probably not going to add a couple hundred dollars to a MacBook BOM (and maybe a bump for the lens) for a better webcam--at least they wouldn't have before the current situation. Who knows now? Maybe a top-notch webcam is a selling point. Many people still wouldn't set up lighting and eliminate backlighting to give it a chance.

A top notch camera is not "a couple hundred dollars" on a BOM. Google Pixel 4a costs $350 for the whole device and it has a great camera, more than enough to serve as a webcam.

You need a 2.1 MP camera to get 1080p, which the vast majority of laptop webcams don't do. The last time you could get a 2.1 MP main camera in any half decent phone was probably back in 2015. Laptop makers just didn't care, it wasn't a priority for most users before Covid.

Apple got over having a "camera bump" on their phones years ago. On laptops they have way more options--the most straightforward would be to put a matching notch in the bottom-case for when it closes.

Finally higher quality build-in cameras are being included in iMacs. I hope very soon they start making their way into their laptops.

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