iSight (2003)
The aluminum external camera Apple introduced in 2003 alongside iChat AV: one FireWire cable and five minutes were enough for a video call between two Macs.
© Kplans · CC BY 4.0 ↗ © Eyesight · CC BY-SA 3.0 ↗ Resized, no crop or retouching.
Specs
| Connectivity | FireWire 400 · VGA · 30 fps |
| Price | $149 |
| Key feature | 2003–2006 |
Launch
Apple introduced iSight on June 23, 2003 at WWDC in San Francisco, alongside iChat AV, on sale that same day for $149. Together they enabled video conferences between two Macs over any broadband connection, and audio conferences even over a 56k modem. iChat AV shipped as a free public beta for Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar and became a key feature of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, also sold separately as a $29.95 upgrade. The keynote survives in an archival copy on the Internet Archive. The announcement specified Mac OS X 10.2.5 or later and the iChat AV beta for the camera; video conferencing required a Mac with a 600 MHz PowerPC G3 or faster. The public beta was time-limited, not a permanent free licence for the final product.
Marketing
The idea was video conferencing "for the rest of us": presenting it, Steve Jobs claimed anyone could set it up in under five minutes, just by installing the software and plugging in the camera. The design aimed at natural conversation: a center mount on top of the screen with a tilt-and-rotate mechanism for face-to-face calls, a single FireWire cable carrying audio, video and power, and an aluminum body smaller and lighter than most cell phones of the time, made to travel clipped to a PowerBook or iBook. An on-board processor adjusted color, white balance, sharpness and contrast by itself, and the dual-element microphone suppressed ambient noise.
Flaws and fixes
Video conferencing was a closed circuit: it took two Macs with broadband, and over a modem only audio got through. Resolution stayed at VGA 640x480 at 30 frames per second, fine for 2003 but quickly tight once built-in cameras improved. That was also the ending: Apple began fitting iSight cameras into iMac and notebook screens, and in late 2006 the external one disappeared from the Apple Store and sold out at major resellers, as Engadget documented, with no direct successor: video calling moved to the cameras built into the screens. The iSight name lived on for years in the built-in cameras until Apple adopted the FaceTime brand in 2010. As privacy touches ahead of their time, iSight had a green activity LED and a physical shutter that closed by twisting the front.