Either the front or back cameras will be better than any laptop you have. One option is to use your phone's camera. Especially for a smaller, low-slung laptop like the Air, your camera isn't going to be at an optimal angle if it's sitting on your desk or kitchen table and aimed up at you. There's at least a reasonable chance you're beaming into an online Zoom meeting (or other video meeting) from a pre-2022 MacBook Air or something similar. And that means your Zoom or other video meetings are not going to look great, both because of the camera and because many people don't have their laptops set up to capture a decent-looking image.

The side effect of MacBooks being in wide circulation and tending to last for many years is that there's a lot of older hardware out there.

However, many Windows laptops were even ahead of Apple in adding better 1080p webcams over the past few years.

Many MacBook owners are still using either older Intel versions or the 13-inch M1 MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, and all of those systems are held back by one unfortunate quirk: a flat-looking 720p-resolution webcam with lots of noise and a lack of depth-sensing technology.Ī lot of Windows laptops are barely better, many with similar outdated webcams, but at least some have better light sensitivity, color accuracy or depth sensing for facial-recognition logins. In April 2020, when pandemic remote working led to a 500% increase in daily traffic to the Zoom download page, some critics said the company’s software was “a privacy disaster” and even malware.Almost every new MacBook sold today has an upgraded high-resolution webcam, but that only helps if you've bought one in the last year or so. It is not the first time Zoom’s focus on frictionless use has led to a security hole. Normally, the company tries to ensure that is safe by limiting the installer to only operate on code that has been cryptographically signed by Zoom, but the bug discovered by Wardle means that an attacker could trivially bypass that protection and convince the installer to load and run any malware they want. In order to make the user journey simpler, the installer continues to run in the background from the moment a user first installs zoom, and does so with “superuser” privileges, allowing it to change anything about the computer. It targets the Zoom installer, which the company uses to enable frictionless automatic updates. Discovered by an independent security researcher, Patrick Wardle – whose brother Jeremy invented the popular game Wordle – the vulnerability was first presented at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas last week.

Zoom download for macbook