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

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.

You can clip your iPhone to a monitor, too.

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.

DeskView lets you see your camera view and desktop together.

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 on older models. Considering many people hang on to their MacBooks for five-plus years or longer, that's a meaningful move. Still, it's a very non-Apple-feeling solution.

Continuity Camera will be part of macOS Ventura, coming this fall.

For more, check out our hands on with Apple's M2 MacBook Air and the video below.

About Our Expert

Sascha Segan

Former Lead Analyst, Mobile

My Experience

I'm that 5G guy. I've actually been here for every "G." I reviewed well over a thousand products during 18 years working full-time at PCMag.com, including every generation of the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S. I also wrote a weekly newsletter, Fully Mobilized, where I obsessed about phones and networks.

My Areas of Expertise

US and Canadian mobile networks
Mobile phones released in the US
iPads, Android tablets, and ebook readers
Mobile hotspots
Big data features such as Fastest Mobile Networks and Best Work-From-Home Cities

The Technology I Use

Being cross-platform is critical for someone in my position. In the US, the mobile world is split pretty cleanly between iOS and Android. So I think it's really important to have Apple, Android and Windows devices all in my daily orbit.

I use a Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 for work and a 2021 Apple MacBook Pro for personal use. My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, although I'm probably going to move to an Android foldable. Most of my writing is either in Microsoft OneNote or a free notepad app called Notepad++. Number crunching, which I do often for those big data stories, is via Microsoft Excel, DataGrip for MySQL, and Tableau.

In terms of apps and cloud services, I use both Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive heavily, although I also have iCloud because of the three Macs and three iPads in our house. I subscribe to way too many streaming services.

My primary tablet is a 12.9-inch, 2020-model Apple iPad Pro. When I want to read a book, I've got a 2018-model flat-front Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. My home smart speakers run Google Home, and I watch a TCL Roku TV. And Verizon Fios keeps me connected at home.

My first computer was an Atari 800 and my first cell phone was a Qualcomm Thin Phone. I still have very fond feelings about both of them.

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