I was going to try to do some work tonight, but ended up messing around, so I’m deciding to put down something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

All modern Apple computers ship with a small application called Photo Booth. On quick glance, there’s not much to it. It just lets you take photos with the built in webcam. Programs like this have existed forever.. my logitech webcam software includes one.

But compared to the others, Photo Booth is just, well, better. It’s got a more straightforward interface, it has the nice 4-shot mode which invokes the fun that people have meat space photo booths, and it’s got just enough effects to let you take that silly shot, without overloading the interface. And then there’s the “turn the screen white to flash” trick which is pure genius.

Clearly, a lot of TLC went into this. But why? I mean, who cares? Isn’t it just a little webcam app that anyone can write?

The genius of Photo Booth is that Apple realizes it’s so much more than that.

Tons of people use this thing (I bet it’s way more used than the Address Book). Whether it’s just a bunch of friends making a silly picture, or you taking a new photo to upload to Facebook, or whether you’re just playing with it at the Apple store. As sad as it is, webcams built into computers have existed for quite a while now, and the only real killer app (so far) is Skype. But people like taking pictures of themselves! and if they’re at the computer, the webcam is the camera you have.

I think the investment made in Photo Booth (and honestly, it’s probably not that much from a code point of view) just is another example of Apple really understanding the consumer mindset. Can you imagine a Dell, or a Lenovo, or even a Microsoft coming up with this thing? It’s so silly, and yet so fun, social, and surprisingly useful. And Apple realize that it was important enough that they weren’t going to rely on some 3rd party to fill in that part of the experience.

When it ships with the device, it becomes part of the device. People think: “oh you can take photos of yourself on a mac”, not: “oh there’s this included app for the osx operating system that lets you take photos of yourself”. All PC laptops these days have webcams. A lot of them probably even ship with Photo booth-like software. But I don’t see perceiving it in the same way.