same... i'm also surprised that having a software controlled led would be cheaper ..

It could be something very simple, such as requiring less USB hub complexity for a camera that can be woken up via a command on the USB bus instead of needing to connect/disconnect the USB power rails (wired in parallel with the LED) to it.

Somebody here has also mentioned Apple using the camera for brightness and maybe color temperature measurement, for which they wouldn't want to enable the LED (or it would effectively always be on).

That doesn't automatically make that a good tradeoff, of course; I'd appreciate such a construction.