MacBook – “No connected camera” error using MacBook Air

Is your MacBook Pro the MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2.53GHz, Mid 2009) model? That model of MBP had a known issue where it would constantly beach-ball with non Apple drives. There was a firmware update available but that hasn't fixed all units.

From personal (and professional) experience I've found upgrading to Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 fixed about 50% of the time, all other units had to have an official Apple drive fitted to fix the issue.

Basically your only options are to upgrade to Snow Leopard (I'm unsure of whether Lion includes the relevant firmware updates) or complain to Apple so much that they give you a replacement unit. Ugh.

So, if I understand correctly, you did these steps:

1. Upgraded to 10.8.5
2. Found the camera didn't work in Skype
3. Backed up /Library/CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins/DAL/AppleCamera.plugin
4. Put AppleCamera.plugin from 10.8.4 in its place
5. Camera worked
6. Upgraded to 10.8.5 Supplemental Update
7. Camera broken again

The Supplemental Update does include a copy of AppleCamera.plugin (see below), so one quick thing to try:

1. Put your copy of AppleCamera.plugin from step (3) back into place
2. Download the 10.8.5 Supplemental Update again. You can get it as a DMG file from Apple DL1686
3. Re-run that update (double click the .pkg file in the DMG)

By the way, you can see what files are contained within the update: double click the .pkg file, then choose File > Show Files from the installer.