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TheCoreh

Is there a significant share of the laptop market that ships _without_ webcams?

I haven't seen a single laptop manufactured in the past 15 years that doesn't have a webcam built-in.

The actual good news is requiring it to be HD, so the days of potato quality video calls are soon over.

Besides, a lot of manufacturers are now shipping cameras with physical covers, I expect that trend to continue

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It's a matter of principle. Yes, the majority of laptops do have a front facing camera and that probably won't be an issue for the majority of consumers.

This is just an opening to put more and more biometric stuff into the OS itself. How will Windows 11 behave if I disable the camera via software? Will it just turn it back on? Will it throw an error or refuse to work if I tape over it? These implications are what actually concern me.

If you put a piece of tape over it I imagine Windows Hello will stop working.

https://www.hardware-corner.net/guides/laptops-without-webca...

Not a large list of current ones, but several of note. Quite a few current Asus Zephyrus models.

I thought the same, but my Rog Zephyrus doesn't have a webcam built in by default and it's available at big box stores.

It depends on what you mean by a significant share, right before the pandemic Asus came out with a gamer laptop that was based on AMD and was both cheaper and better than most of its competitors but, sadly, sold out almost everywhere.

It also didn't have camera.

There are some really security conscious places where you can’t bring in any device with a camera. So you have to leave your smartphone in the locker and the company provides its users with cameraless laptops.

Most laptops do. Most PC's don't. No idea how that plays out for PC's. Not sure why this is specific to laptops unless the goal is to treat them like cell phones.

Asus zephyrus G14 don't have a webcam.

Don't worry. There will always be people in your Jitsi/Zoom/Teams/Meat/Whatever who will hurt your ears (or be nearly inaudible), drop out randomly despite nobody else having any issues at all, or have really crappy video. Or, any combination of the aforementioned.

It's some kind of fundamental law of digital meetings.

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