alt Hacker News> the LED can't be controlled from software
If you look at tear downs apparently it is connected to the webcam so it is energized when the webcam receives power making it nearly impossible to defeat.
You can say a lot about Apple but the engineering is clever at the hardware level.
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It's not even that clever, really. The camera power rail must be physically close to the camera, so it's trivial to hang an LED off it. A device manufacturer has to go out of their way to make it so the LED and camera function are independent, and I'm sure many do, for the worst reasons you can possibly think of.
This still would allow one to "strobe" the power line making it impossible for a human to see the LED but the camera could still capture snapshots and at a decent framerate even.
Also the Hall effect sensor disabling the mic when a MacBook lid is closed, apparently just about impossible to bypass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall_effect