Just how important is your iSight? Do you use it regularly? Is it used by your children for hours of entertainment? Is it used for teleconferencing and online meetings? Does a special needs child need it to attend classes at school? No matter what it may be used for, it is as important to some users as any other input device on the machine.
The iSight was first introduced in June 2003 as a FireWire peripheral. The original Sight resolution was 640×480, and the built-in cameras that followed support HD standard 720p, with 1280×720 resolution. Apple has since dropped the “iSight” moniker in favor of FaceTime camera.
This week, a customer dropped off a mid-2007 MacBook where the camera was not being recognized by the OS. There are two possible points of failure when this happens because the iSight camera is mounted within the bezel brace of the display and it has a single cable that connects it to the logic board. This cable is paired with the low voltage display cable and runs through the right hinge of the display.
On the MacBook, the camera cable shares a plug with the display cable. This plug connects to the hard drive and optical drive. Part of the camera/bezel piece is the microphone which plugs into the logic board on the far left, next to the battery connector/sleep sensor board. Reseating this cable did not have an effect on the performance of the device.
Since that didn’t work, I then started to strip down the display module. After removing the plastic bezel from the display housing, it is necessary to remove twelve phillips head screws to tilt out the entire display with braces and camera attached.
With the display tipped out of the housing, I was able to access the low voltage display cable on the back of the LCD and the small flat four pin connector of the USB based camera. I reseated the cable for the camera and restarted the system, but seemingly made no progress in finding a solution.
As noted in the service manual, the next step was to replace the entire camera and its bezel. (While mounted within the bezel, the camera does plug into a small card that the cable running through the hinge plugs into as well.) On a lark, I disassembled these pieces by removing the four screws—two in the camera on the front and two in the daughter board on the rear.
After pulling this connection apart and reseating the connections, the camera, after a restart of the machine, was available and functional.
This repair is atypical. When a component becomes unavailable, more often than not, it has failed and needs replacement. In the case of this MacBook’s iSight, it required the complete break down of the display module and the replacement of the camera, as well as the system microphone and associated frame components. Luckily, reseating a few connectors (which the service manual doesn’t specify) did the trick!