Apple Built a Kludge to Fix Your Mac's Hideous Webcam

pcmag.com:

For a company that makes truly great phone cameras, Apple's insistence on putting genuinely bad webcams on its laptops and monitors has long been perplexing. The Apple Studio Display was known for abysmal webcam quality, and even the brand-new MacBook Air still has only a 1080p webcam. Older MacBooks have notoriously lousy cameras.

Apple also loves to sell you two products instead of one. So now it has a Mac webcam fix: an iPhone. In a hilarious kludge, a new macOS feature called Continuity Camera lets you literally clip your iPhone to the top of your Mac to use as a much higher-quality webcam.

Third-party apps have let you do this for several years now, but they aren't integrated into the OS, and that makes all the difference. With third-party apps such as Camo, typically you need to plug your iPhone into your Mac (for latency reasons) and also run the app on your Mac.

Continuity Camera works wirelessly, and the iPhone is just seen by the Mac as a camera, which means it works in third-party apps like Zoom and WebEx as well. If you get a call or message on your phone, it will appear in a window on your PC through the other Continuity features.

It will also enable a trick called "DeskView," which will let you share your camera view and an overhead view of your desktop, side by side.

Belkin will sell stands and clips to do this later this year, according to Apple, which showed off some of the early models today at WWDC. Honestly, it seems pretty awkward. The whole assemblage is big and clunky, and it looks like it overbalances the top of a skinny MacBook Air.

This fixes a real problem, and it fixes the problem retroactively; while Apple could put good cameras in its laptops going forward, it can't go back and fix the ones