First commercial webcam ever integrated directly into a laptop was the Apple iSight in 2006, ending the dark era of balancing clunky third-party cameras on top of your monitor.

A closer look

First commercial webcam ever integrated directly into a laptop was the Apple iSight in 2006, ending the dark era of balancing clunky third-party cameras on top of your monitor. Before this brave innovation, anyone who wanted to visually communicate had to install incredibly hostile software drivers and clip a plastic eyeball to their screen with a flimsy hinge that constantly fell off. Embedding the camera directly into the bezel changed the aesthetic of hardware design permanently, though it also ushered in the paranoid necessity of putting tiny pieces of electrical tape over our screens to thwart hackers. Apple effectively normalized the concept of having a high-definition lens staring directly at your face during all waking hours. Now we just naturally accept that our expensive productivity machines double as extremely unflattering digital mirrors during mandatory corporate video meetings