Johnny Ives was obsessed with thinness - it’s the same problem which lead to the bad keyboards. Now they’ve been putting people who haven’t forgotten about usability in charge I would not be surprised if the next case design included a non-terrible webcam since it’s unlikely that anyone is going to stop video conferencing even if we do go back to the office.
I have no doubt that Johnny Ives was obsessed with thinness.
But ... my shiny new Lenovo Carbon X1, which is an engineering laptop if there ever was one, is developing key impressions all over it's very expensive 4K OLED screen because they didn't put enough space between the keyboard and the display when it is closed, presumably to keep the thing thin.
I'm curious why you'd think the x1 is better than a lot of other laptops that are much more affordable. My Dell G5 SE with a Ryzen 7, 32 GB Ram and 1.5TB SSD is a beast. I haven't begun to scrape the surface of what it can do. And with AMD doing so much better than Intel, I'm just surprised how people who want an engineering device still use Intel.
Im not an AMD fan boy, all my last devices were Intel. I'm just curious.
That's easy. I bought a 4K OLED screen. Laptops are a dime a dozen in just about any spec and things like SSD's can be upgraded, but a laptop with a 4K OLED screen are rare. There is not a lot of choice.
My previous laptop was 4K. Sadly I discovered after I had it for a year or so 4K is addictive. It's hard to give up the screen real estate once your used to it. When it comes to 4K on Lenovo it's the X1 or nothing, and Dell's keyboards have pissed me off for the last time. I didn't look beyond Dell and Lenovo.
The OLED was a first and only available on the X1. It's lovely and all, the contrast ratio and max brightness are extraordinary. So extraordinary if I take the brightness beyond 10% or so in an office I can't look at it for long periods. It's also twice the price, and heaver on the battery. No huge regrets, as it is a truly beautiful screen, but I won't be doing it again.
All that said, those key marks on the beautiful OLED screen are really starting to piss me off.
Interesting. Thank you for your response. I've been told 4k on a laptop screen is bad for your eyes. I've never experienced it myself, so I have no experience there.
Quality. ThinkPad, Apple, or some of Dell's premium lines won't break with life. This translates into:
- Mechanical build quality
- Choice of auxiliary components (wifi camera+chipset, etc.). If you're at a conference, you want to get connected and hook up to a projector reliably.
- Battery life
- Cooling
- Keyboard/pointer quality
- Size/weight
And so on. If you fly with a laptop once a week, whether the screws fall out from plane vibrations makes a difference.
One bad business trip, and you've covered the price delta of a half-dozen laptops. I'd never buy an over-speced, under-built laptop like the G5 SE. If my laptop is 15% slower, I care a lot less than if it's 15% more reliable.
No, but I was responding to someone who said MacBook. I think there’s also a dynamic where once the thinness race started with the PowerBooks everyone else spent the last couple of decades chasing Apple — the difference in height is really easy to see whereas a crappy camera or keyboard indentations doesn’t show up until after the purchase.
Interestingly that happened with my 2016 MacBook Pro. When the screen needed to be replaced due to a panel cracked ribbon cable I noticed that the newer screens had a slightly deeper rubber gasket around the edge (reducing thinness by just under a mm or so) to stop the keyboard rubbing on the screen of the laptop.
Thanks for the correction - there’s an iOS autocomplete joke in there somewhere.
I think what we see is basically showing the difference between the phone and laptop markets: people buy new phones to get better cameras because that’s one of the most common activities for a phone but the same is not true for laptops (or at least wasn’t previously), and there’s a much lower threshold where a mediocre camera prevents a sale. That lack of pressure means there isn’t much of a check on either cost cutting or pursuit of thinner/lighter designs.
Like it or not, Apple's often the benchmark the rest of the industry measure themselves against. So if / when Apple improves the MBP cam, the rest will follow. Until then, there's no point in cutting into the razor-thin margin.
I think it’d be interesting to compare with equivalent price points. Does a $2500 PC have a better camera than a MacBook Pro or is it really more like everyone is skimping and Mac owners are just more vocal about expecting something closer to a mid-2010s iPhone?
The only justification I can think of for having such a cheap webcam is that it takes less battery power to process low-res streaming video at lower frame rates.
How thick is the MacBook Pro lid compared to that phone — especially when you factor in curvature & the screen hardware? I think the discrepancy is mostly explained by cameras being a feature which phone buyers pay a LOT of attention to, whereas it was an afterthought for most laptop users prior to 2020 while thinness was a marketing goal, and don't forget that laptop buyers pay the full price up front while a LOT of people pay for their “free” phones monthly.
I'm not in any way excusing the crappy hardware — my iPhone 6S should not be a better webcam than anything built-in or on the normal market now — but I think this is a pretty expected outcome of market forces reflecting buyers' priorities.
Company outfitted us with Dell Alienware m17 R3 laptops, an expensive gaming model that has built-in head tracking. The camera is a 720p with terrible image quality, worse than any Macbook. So no, I don't think Apple is below standard here.
