I am surprised Apple for all its wealth in industrial design and user experience haven't figured out people need a physical cover on their cameras
Having just had my screen be ruined by a micro-fracture I would rather just trust the green indicator dot than be without my laptop for a week.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/lenovo-thinkshutter-laptops-...
“All Apple silicon-based Mac notebooks and Intel-based Mac notebooks with the Apple T2 Security Chip feature a hardware disconnect that disables the microphone whenever the lid is closed”
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/security/hardware-microphone...
Apple's attitude has always been condescending. Forcing users to fit the product, instead of the other way around. Then again, this totalitarian mentality isn't only confined to Apple.
No, if they added one it would show that they actually care about reassuring their users' privacy, instead of merely saying "trust us".
It's funny because having actually worked at Apple this isn't the case at all. They do a lot of product market research and PMs always read Radar, Feedback Reporter etc. Look at the recent pivots on keyboard, TouchBar, MagSafe, SD card etc.
It's more that people such as yourself are being condescending by assuming that your view of the world is the right one and everyone else is wrong.
In this case you assume that people (a) don't trust that Apple always shows the indicator light when the camera is on and (b) are willing to accept a thicker device for this feature.
Perhaps it's just me, I wonder why would people say that they love open-source while using devices with such a closed ecosystem, using various approaches to make it incompatible other things.
And now that most buttons are controlled by software anyway, where’s the difference to a “physical” button? Better to have a hard-wired camera light that you cannot bypass.
Apart from that, not having to choose often feels more liberating than restricting. You’re almost guaranteed to be overwhelmed by options and feel stupid afterwards, no matter what you chose, because there is always a better choice to be made. Ever detailed a new car? It’s paralyzing. Base models are simply base templates. Options creep in. If you allow several, intransparent dependencies appear, frustrate you and soon you expect everything to be completely modular.
Better to have a small number of pre-defined, comprehensive packages.
And I don't believe anyone on here is talking about camera covers for their phone.
[1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research?page=1&sort=oldes...
> Face ID automatically adapts to changes in your appearance, such as wearing cosmetic makeup or growing facial hair ... Face ID is designed to work with hats, scarves, glasses, contact lenses, and many sunglasses. Furthermore, it's designed to work indoors, outdoors, and even in total darkness.
And to improve features like:
> Even if you don’t enroll in Face ID, the TrueDepth camera intelligently activates to support attention aware features, like dimming the display if you aren't looking at your device or lowering the volume of alerts if you're looking at your device. For example, when using Safari, your device checks to determine if you're looking at your device and turns the screen off if you aren’t. If you don’t want to use these features, you can open Settings > Face ID & Passcode and disable Attention Aware Features.
( https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT208108 ).
It can also help to improve facial recognition in photos which Apple has been featuring for some time now in their Photos app.
You're picking a very odd target for this in Apple, who are pretty clear about their attitude on privacy, especially when it comes to cameras and microphones - for instance modern Macs and iPads have hardware disconnects for the microphones[1] when closed & Macs have green indicator LEDs wired into the camera hardware to make it impossible to activate the camera without the light coming on (as noted in the article we're commenting on!)
Also, you're still talking about FaceID: the parent comment pointed out that FaceID doesn't exist on the Mac. Craig Federighi was actually asked about FaceID support for the new notch Macs when they were released, and he said that he didn't think there was a benefit vs the TouchID sensor because it'd still be necessary to have the user tap a physical button to confirm actions -- e.g. for purchases or privilege escalation. The camera assembly would also need to be thicker & larger to put the FaceID projector & IR camera in place.
On using continuously (and surreptitiously/illegally) captured camera data to improve FaceID's model of the owner for iPhone/iPad: there's just no need to continuously capture - there is already plenty of opportunity to update the face model every time the phone is unlocked. I don't know what the stats on this are but I'd imagine users are unlocking their phones hundreds of times a day.
>It can also help to improve facial recognition in photos which Apple has been featuring for some time now in their Photos app.
They already have lots of data here from your photos already, and since they're stored in your photo library your Mac has access to them to re-run recognition if needed if an updated version of the Photos app comes with a model update. Not to mention that by using above-board data they are able to get corrections for classification errors (since the user operating/looking at the computer may well not be the account owner).
1: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/secbbd20b00b/...
Personally I trust them on privacy more than any other tech company, and I think would give them the benefit of the doubt that what you experienced was a settings bug (or a well-intentioned firewall exception) - but I'm sure I would feel differently if it was my settings that had been reset, and I know that once that trust is shaken it's nearly impossible to rebuild it.