I recently came across a pretty interesting concept; a detachable webcam.
I expect that frame.work are not going to want to change the form factor of the 13" for a while (and the gen2 webcam module looks great!) but having a connector on the top of the laptop with a detachable webcam module that fits inside one of the expansion card slots would certainly be an interesting idea - with perhaps the ability to use the connector for other purposes as well.
This only really makes sense if you are completely deleting bezels and don’t want to add a notch, unless they do a new bigger panel for the 13 with new (barely existing) bezels I don’t really see why that would be needed here.
You can already do that with most normal webcams (just usb on a weird connector), the one used by snapdragon laptops being the exception (they use a more phone like interface).
Well, with the exception of internal usb often providing 3.3v instead of 5v. The FW camera connection is 3.3v, iirc.
I was talking about the data part, voltage conversion is pretty trivial especially at those power levels (and most 3.3 webcams I have dealt with take 5v without issues)
It was more the idea of a magnetic attachment point that provides usb power/data transfer that I thought was quite interesting particularly for things that don’t fit inside an expansion card (e.g. a 5g LTE card or CF Express B card reader) but appreciate perhaps quite niche.
Wecams have been overwhelmingly usb2 so most of those would be kind of a waste, neat idea though.