Since apple is so proud of their ecosystem, I still can not understand, why I can not use an iPhone as a web cam for a Mac without third party software. Especially after one year of work from home.

I've seen a handful of streamers use phones (admittedly premium Android phones, not iPhones) and they tend to overhead after an hour or two indoors.

Agreed -- but I also have to say, setting up OBS to use your iPhone as a virtual camera is pretty trivial.

While I'm not sure I'd call it "bad", the webcams on even the 2019 MBPs (last I've personally tried) were kind of overwhelmingly mediocre. The front and rear cameras on basically all the android phones I've used in 6 years are all much, much clearer than the mac's built in webcam.

I was kinda shocked to see how poor the MacBook camera was considering how good the front facing camera is on the iPhone. Then I realised that on the MacBook it only ever gets used for video calls which will get compressed to 200x150px while the iPhone front facing camera is mostly for selfies

The M1 macs apparently use the same or similar camera used since 2011, albeit with better image processing, which is kind of disappointing.

MacBook lids are really thin.

I can’t recall the name of the software off hand, but you can use your iPhone as an external camera for your Mac.

EDIT Looks like there’s a couple of options, for example EpocCam.

For paid software with which I have no affiliation beyond being a happy customer, there’s Reincubate Camo: https://reincubate.com/camo/

I've been using this method with pretty good result: https://github.com/apancik/iphone-as-a-webcam

Thank you very much, this is exactly the satisfactory solution I haven't found when I was looking for it before! I expected that the iPhones screen recording was only available in Quicktime and not for third-party apps like OBS. Going to try it out soon with an old iPhone 5, I hope it supports streaming video from the camera in the browser.

Doesn’t work with FaceTime, unfortunately.