Love my new MB 12 but a 480p FaceTime camera - Yuck

Maybe in the future you should consider reading the product specifications before purchasing, don't you think? Helps take the surprise out of the obvious.

Right there in the Specs. It's not like buying a Corvette at all.

No, it's more like buying a Chevy Cruze and being surprised that it doesn't have a V8. And then whining about it on a GM customer support web site.

Then maybe you bought the wrong one. Go to Best Buy and get one with a 720p camera.

You just said you found lots of laptops with 720p cameras. There is only one MacBook model.

Yeah it's kinda stupid to have a 480p webcam on a device with a 2304-by-1440 pixel screen. The 13" Air has a 720p webcam with a 1440 by 900 screen. So you can either have a good webcam or a good screen, the quality of one doesn't rise with the quality of the other, but goes in the opposite direction. I didn't buy one. It feels slower than the Air when switching between applications in the store. If they're phasing out the Air, I'm hoping the MacBook gets better in future versions. I wish they had just given the Air a better screen and not created a new category with a better screen and no other better specs.

It's a matter of design choices. The MacBook's lid is too thin to hold the higher resolution camera, compared to the thickness of the lid for the MacBook Air. If you give the MacBook Air a Retina display, then the battery run time is significantly impacted. Part of the engineering that made the Retina display in the MacBook possible was to reduce the power demands of the CPU by using the lower energy and less powerful Intel mobile CPUs, that don't need fan cooling, and by shrinking the size of the logic board to about 1/4th the size of the MacBook Air to make room for enough batteries to run the Retina display.

It's all in the packaging. Note that the updated 2016 12" MacBook still has the same 480p camera.

I saw the 2016 announcement and the camera was the first thing I checked which led me to this discussion.

It's all for a thinner lid? What, were they hoping someone would design a thinner 720p camera in time for launch and then ran out of time? I have no complaints about the thin/thick-ness of the Air's lid.

Okay, what about the iPad Pro's? The smaller one has better camera than the larger one. Was that a thin-ness constraint?

Just go look for yourself. The lid of the MacBook is thinner than the thickness of any of the iPads, or even the iPhones. It's all a matter of design choices. The base has one USB-C port partly because it so thin that nothing else would fit. There is no space left to add a 2nd one because the keyboard is in the way and the other side has just enough space for the headphone jack. There's no space on the back edge because the lid covers that area when it's open.

It is what it is, no amount of whining is going to change it. If you were expecting different reuirements, then you should have purchased the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.

Done here, bye.

Oh, I have looked. If only I could look into the souls of designers to understand why this extreme of thin-ness is worth downgrading the webcam. And what's wrong with whining? What's the Niemöller quote? "At first they came for the webcam and I said nothing, because I was getting an uber-thin laptop, and that's more important than a quality webcam, right? Then they came for the headphone jack and I said nothing, because using headphones is overrated and I still have the built-in speakers. Then they came for the speakers and I said nothing, because I can buy bluetooth speakers, right? Then they came for the keyboard, etc., etc...blah blah blah..."

Good job. There is no reason for people to be so rude to others in defense of Apple. For someone to whom FaceTime is important it matter. But maybe they do need to expand their choices and buy something other than Apple.