Apple iSight

» see apple.com/isight as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

mac users with firewire ports bought the isight. that was not my crowd. in 2003 i was finishing computer engineering coursework on a windows desktop in ankara, ttnet adsl had just landed at home, and the apple ecosystem was a magazine spread i flipped past. firewire as a video peripheral standard sat outside the windows hardware stack i was on.

the isight launched at wwdc on june 23 2003 alongside ichat av. a small aluminum cylinder roughly three inches long with a quarter-inch ccd sensor and f/2.8 autofocus lens, capped by a rotating privacy shutter. a single firewire 400 cable carried audio and video plus the power that ran the sensor. it cost $149 and shipped with magnetic mounting hardware so it would clip to the top of a powerbook lid or a cinema display.

the cultural moment was specific. for two and a half years before macbooks started shipping with built-in cameras in late 2005, the external isight was the only first-party way to do video chat on a mac. ichat av paired with it as the software half of a single apple-built video calling stack at a time when microsoft and aol were still figuring out their own video clients.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the design press loved it. the aluminum body matched the powermac g5 industrial language steve jobs had been rolling out since 2002, and the magnetic mount made it the rare accessory that did not turn the powerbook lid into a tangle of clips and clamps. the privacy shutter was the kind of small ergonomic touch that webcam manufacturers would not adopt for another decade.

~ the decline ~

built-in isight cameras arrived in the imac g5 in october 2005 and then in the first intel macbook pro in january 2006. the moment the camera was integrated into the lid bezel of every shipping mac, the external accessory had no market left. firewire 400 was also losing the peripheral war to usb 2.0. the new internal cameras were usb, not firewire, which made the original isight an even narrower product. apple stopped shipping the external in december 2006 with no farewell press release. the support page stayed up for years.

~ what replaced it ~

the name kept going. apple called the built-in webcam in every macbook and imac an isight until 2010, when the rebrand to facetime camera arrived with the iphone 4 facetime launch. the original aluminum cylinder did not get inherited by anything. it sits beside [[apple-quicktake]] and [[apple-powercd]] in the cleanly-dead apple peripheral list, the brief small accessories with a discrete launch event and no successor.

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