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There are times when Apple swallows its pride and puts product usability ahead of the company’s narrative of being a leader and an innovator. Wireless charging, bezel-less displays, and dual cameras on the iPhone are the most the recent examples.
But there’s one area where Apple is stubbornly holding onto the innovator narrative and badly impacting the usability of its most important product–and that’s with Face ID on the iPhone X, and soon the iPhone XS as well.
New 2018 iPhone: Everything we know so far
It’s not that Apple hasn’t done a decent job with Face ID, because it has. Facial recognition technology has been around on other phones for years, but Apple made it more effective and more secure.
The problem is that Face ID just isn’t well suited to enough scenarios as the Touch ID fingerprint scanner was. Face ID doesn’t work well in low light and it doesn’t work well at times when it’s slow, awkward, or difficult to point your phone at your face–like when you’re phone is sitting on your desk and you want to check a notification or you’re sitting at a stoplight and you want to change playlists on a music app.
SEE: iOS tips and tricks for business pros (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
Touch ID isn’t perfect either, of course. It doesn’t work well when your hands are wet or dirty or when you’ve got a pair of gloves on. Those are all times when Face ID could work great. The two could compliment each other perfectly. In fact, combining the two together could have made the iPhone arguably one of, if not the most, usable, productive, and security-conscious phones on the market–at least in terms of authentication.
Instead, having only Face ID means the latest iPhones take a step backward in usability, because there are more times that Face ID doesn’t work than Touch ID didn’t.
There were signs that Apple wanted to do both. The company was reportedly doing everything possible to integrate Touch ID into the front of the bezel-less iPhone X screen, but couldn’t make the technology work. When that happened, Apple should have had a swallow-its-pride moment and just integrated the fingerprint scanner into the back of the phone where most people naturally rest their forefinger–where the Google Pixel devices put it. Sure, it has some disadvantages compared to being on the front of the phone, but it would be far better than being limited to Face ID only.
I used the iPhone X for two months and I got so frustrated by the limitations of Face ID that I switched back to the iPhone 8–which I had been using for a month before the iPhone X was released. On the iPhone X, I found myself constantly having to failover and enter my pin to login far more than I ever had to do with Touch ID.
What beloved features will Apple kill off next?
By all reports, we expect that Apple’s three new 2018 iPhone models will all use Face ID and drop Touch ID. This is a mistake and step backward.
Because I’m a tech journalist and have to stay current and write about these things, I’ve bit the bullet and upgraded iPhones every year since 2007 when the first iPhone arrived. I can’t do it in 2018. I’m going to hold onto the iPhone 8 and its Touch ID sensor until Apple swallows its pride and combines Face ID and Touch ID into a future iPhone–hopefully in 2019.
Image: Apple
Also see
Touch-based identity faces an uncertain future after Face IDiPhone X: The hardware behind Face IDFace ID beefs up iPhone security. But is it right for everybody?Has Face ID killed the Touch ID star?Face ID won’t forget you – even if you get a new hairdoHow to temporarily disable Face ID if someone tries to unlock your phoneiPhone X review: Face ID, the notch and a new screeniPhone 8’s embedded Touch ID may still be causing headaches (CNET)Face ID 2 could be the biggest improvement on the iPhone XS (CNET)iOS apps are coming to Mac: Everything you need to know (Download.com)iPhone X and iPhone XS: 20 apps that look great on ‘The Notch’ (Download.com)Don’t look your best in the morning? That may keep iPhone X Face ID from working (TechRepublic)
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