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Huge miss to not have touch id in a era of a raging pandemic. I literally have not used the face-id once outside my house since March, because I always use a ma

Huge miss to not have touch id in a era of a raging pandemic. I literally have not used the face-id once outside my house since March, because I always use a mask, so I have to type in my password. Which I had to revert to an unsafe 6 digit one from my 12char alphanumeric that I had until March.

onedognight 6y ago
What’s makes this even more frustrating is that they just came out with Touch ID in the power button foe the iPad Air, so they could have put both on the phone.
- tomduncalf 6y ago
  I had the same thought initially, but the reality is that the amount of rework required in terms of design, development, QA and production (parts, production lines) will be huge at Apple’s scale. You probably have to plan features like that more than a year out, so they’d have to skip this generation (which they will have invested a huge amount it), which realistically was never going to happen. I agree that the lack of Touch ID feels like a fairly big deal though. Face ID is useless right now and I don’t see things getting back to “normal” in terms of no mask wearing for some time, so I think I will wait and see if they bring it back next year.
- ksec 6y ago
  Just wanted to say the Touch ID on power button was planned for quite some time. As rumour ( more like Supply Chain Fact Check ) from Ming pointed it out last year. The thing he got wrong was that he thought it was for iPhone. Turns out it was for iPad.
samatman 6y ago
Sure is. Problem is that Apple just isn't nimble enough to do anything about it. Everything important about these phones was set in place before there was a pandemic.
- q3k 6y ago
  There's nothing forcing them to release new phones now instead of delaying and releasing a better product.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    There’s a good chance that some of the production pipelines for parts began spooling up months ago. Producing that many phones is a huge undertaking with longer lead times than most people imagine, I imagine that they’d lose billions, and they’d risk releasing a “pandemic-friendly” phone once the pandemic is actually over.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
      You think there’s only going to be one pandemic (SARS, swine flu, bird flu)? How long do you think this mask wearing thing will last (lots of countries that are doing well, mask up all the time)? A pandemic friendly phone will still sell after this is over.
      - gowld 6y ago
        I guess they'll move to iris unlock
      - SllX 6y ago
        You’re not wrong, but there’s also no way in hell Apple was not going to keep their pipeline moving so long as they were able to. It’s not like Apple hasn’t been affected by the pandemic as much as everyone else has; stalling to bring TouchID into this year’s model probably wouldn’t have seen this series of phones released until almost summer next year. Might as well release what they’ve prepared and hopefully rejigger next year’s lineup if it didn’t call for any kind of inclusion of TouchID. I have a work and personal phone, the work phone has FaceID and I do prefer it, but I intentionally swapped my personal phone out for an iPhone SE because it has TouchID. Any other year, I would have preferred FaceID, but given current conditions and possible future conditions, I would like it to really be either/or with both the FaceID array on top and TouchID built into the side button at some point in the future.
dfcowell 6y ago
100% this. That omission took the 12 from an insta-buy to an "I'm probably going to skip this gen."
sedatk 6y ago
FWIW, Face ID started to work for me with a mask on after iOS 14 update. Apparently, it requires a lot of training by failed attempts with a mask before it starts working. It doesn't work if you have your mask all the way up to cover your nose completely, but a little space is enough.
- netheril96 6y ago
  A face mask that does not cover the nose is equivalent to no mask.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    Pretty sure it's the nostrils that matter. The grandparent post was talking about needing your nose to be partially visible—and the top half of your nose is just skin.
    - ajmurmann 6y ago
      How do you accomplish a tight fit that seals of though to prevent air from going out at the top without covering your nose completely?
      - mkl 6y ago
        I think it differs for everyone, but I can only get a good seal by having the top of the mask (with the bendy metal bit) well down my nose, so the metal bends down into the "crease" bit on the outside of my nostrils. If I have it higher near the bridge, inevitably air comes up my cheeks and out to fog my glasses. My nose is fairly big, I suppose.
        vulcan01 6y ago
        Oh, I've been wearing my mask wrong... My glasses fog up as well, and I've been putting my mask at almost the same height as the lower frame of my glasses...
      - 6y ago
plaidfuji 6y ago
This has been the biggest unexpected benefit of having gone with an SE back in March...
Nextgrid 6y ago
Face ID is a major downgrade from Touch ID regardless of the pandemic. Touch ID (combined with a home button) is a lot faster. You can reach into your pocket or handbag, put the finger on the button and press it while you're taking it out. By the time your phone is out it's unlocked and on the home screen. I don't recall seeing people failing to unlock their phones while paying with Apple Pay before but now it's a reasonably common occurrence if they didn't "prime" it ahead of time. You can also quickly unlock your phone if it's not directly aligned with your face without having to pick it up (let's say it's on a table or desk) or if you're letting another person handle it. Face ID is also annoying in bed, when either your face is obstructed by pillows/blankets or if you're holding your phone too close to your face and need to hold it further away for a second, illuminating the whole room in the process. Touch ID also makes the authentication action explicit. If you're handling someone else's phone, you can look at the lockscreen without attempting to authenticate by simply keeping away from the home button and using the power button to wake it up. With Face ID the simple fact of looking at the phone is an authentication attempt and you'd be consuming the limited amount of attempts the owner has before they have to fall back to a passcode.
- KerrickStaley 6y ago
  One major downside of Touch ID that is niche but affects me personally is that if your fingerprints get damaged (e.g. by rock climbing, which I do regularly) then Touch ID will stop working for ~1 day while your fingers recover. For this reason I'm planning on getting a device with Face ID or a similar feature next time I buy a phone. The downsides of Face ID you mention are valid, though.
  - sinatra 6y ago
    Add your two thumbs and two index fingers so that you can use any one of them depending on convenience or rare edge cases like rock climbing damage to one of them.
  - jamil7 6y ago
    I have a scar across my left thumb from working in kitchens in my 20s and touchID seems really unreliable on that thumb.
killerdhmo 6y ago
This phone was designed, locked in place, and started manufacturing years ago.
- mantap 6y ago
  Adding a fingerprint scanner doesn't affect every component in the phone. It doesn't affect the display, CPU, dimensions or anything with a long lead time. It affects the power button. Apple had well enough time to add it.
  - rimliu 6y ago
    Sometimes it takes _weeks_ to change some button on the _web_. You talk like this was a trivial change that could be made in a day.
  - bhahn 6y ago
    Then why didn’t they? I would give them some benefit of the doubt to one of the biggest companies in the world that they had at least a dozen people research this and came to the conclusion that they couldn’t or didn’t want to (due to cost, design, etc).
    - willis936 6y ago
      The answer seems obvious: they are pigheadedly stubborn when it comes to design decisions. They will never throw away a design decision within 5 years because that would be admitting they made a sub-optimal decision at some point. It simply is not on brand.
    - mantap 6y ago
      The same reason that Apple shipped broken keyboards with MacBooks for years. Because Tim Cook is not a product person. He is an operations person. Adding a fingerprint sensor is good for the product but bad for operations. Who do you think he's going to side with? At the risk of using a cliche, I think Jobs would have made a different decision.
  - ksec 6y ago
jen729w 6y ago
> Which I had to revert to an unsafe 6 digit one from my 12char alphanumeric A 6 character alphanumeric is still way safer than a 6 character numeric. Just pick something you can type as quickly as you can punch in 6 numbers?
swiley 6y ago
Personally I never used either. Biometric authentication just seems like a terrible idea to me and I really don't want my phone collecting data like that.
- sgerenser 6y ago
  iPhones don’t collect biometric data other than locally, and even then only in a form that would never be useful to anyone (hashed and stored on Secure Enclave).
armandhammer 6y ago
Weird, fully masked Face ID has worked fine for me since the iOS 13.5 update (more than 95% of the time). Before that it never worked with a mask on. And I wear the L size huge standard disposable white mask which covers nearly my entire face from the bottom of my eyelids, fully side to side, all the way over my chin.

onedognight 6y ago

What’s makes this even more frustrating is that they just came out with Touch ID in the power button foe the iPad Air, so they could have put both on the phone.

tomduncalf 6y ago
I had the same thought initially, but the reality is that the amount of rework required in terms of design, development, QA and production (parts, production lines) will be huge at Apple’s scale. You probably have to plan features like that more than a year out, so they’d have to skip this generation (which they will have invested a huge amount it), which realistically was never going to happen. I agree that the lack of Touch ID feels like a fairly big deal though. Face ID is useless right now and I don’t see things getting back to “normal” in terms of no mask wearing for some time, so I think I will wait and see if they bring it back next year.
ksec 6y ago
Just wanted to say the Touch ID on power button was planned for quite some time. As rumour ( more like Supply Chain Fact Check ) from Ming pointed it out last year. The thing he got wrong was that he thought it was for iPhone. Turns out it was for iPad.

samatman 6y ago

Sure is. Problem is that Apple just isn't nimble enough to do anything about it. Everything important about these phones was set in place before there was a pandemic.

q3k 6y ago
There's nothing forcing them to release new phones now instead of delaying and releasing a better product.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  There’s a good chance that some of the production pipelines for parts began spooling up months ago. Producing that many phones is a huge undertaking with longer lead times than most people imagine, I imagine that they’d lose billions, and they’d risk releasing a “pandemic-friendly” phone once the pandemic is actually over.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
    You think there’s only going to be one pandemic (SARS, swine flu, bird flu)? How long do you think this mask wearing thing will last (lots of countries that are doing well, mask up all the time)? A pandemic friendly phone will still sell after this is over.
    - gowld 6y ago
      I guess they'll move to iris unlock
    - SllX 6y ago
      You’re not wrong, but there’s also no way in hell Apple was not going to keep their pipeline moving so long as they were able to. It’s not like Apple hasn’t been affected by the pandemic as much as everyone else has; stalling to bring TouchID into this year’s model probably wouldn’t have seen this series of phones released until almost summer next year. Might as well release what they’ve prepared and hopefully rejigger next year’s lineup if it didn’t call for any kind of inclusion of TouchID. I have a work and personal phone, the work phone has FaceID and I do prefer it, but I intentionally swapped my personal phone out for an iPhone SE because it has TouchID. Any other year, I would have preferred FaceID, but given current conditions and possible future conditions, I would like it to really be either/or with both the FaceID array on top and TouchID built into the side button at some point in the future.

dfcowell 6y ago

100% this. That omission took the 12 from an insta-buy to an "I'm probably going to skip this gen."

sedatk 6y ago

FWIW, Face ID started to work for me with a mask on after iOS 14 update. Apparently, it requires a lot of training by failed attempts with a mask before it starts working. It doesn't work if you have your mask all the way up to cover your nose completely, but a little space is enough.

netheril96 6y ago
A face mask that does not cover the nose is equivalent to no mask.
- sjwright 6y ago
  Pretty sure it's the nostrils that matter. The grandparent post was talking about needing your nose to be partially visible—and the top half of your nose is just skin.
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    How do you accomplish a tight fit that seals of though to prevent air from going out at the top without covering your nose completely?
    - mkl 6y ago
      I think it differs for everyone, but I can only get a good seal by having the top of the mask (with the bendy metal bit) well down my nose, so the metal bends down into the "crease" bit on the outside of my nostrils. If I have it higher near the bridge, inevitably air comes up my cheeks and out to fog my glasses. My nose is fairly big, I suppose.
      - vulcan01 6y ago
        Oh, I've been wearing my mask wrong... My glasses fog up as well, and I've been putting my mask at almost the same height as the lower frame of my glasses...
    - 6y ago

plaidfuji 6y ago

This has been the biggest unexpected benefit of having gone with an SE back in March...

Nextgrid 6y ago

Face ID is a major downgrade from Touch ID regardless of the pandemic. Touch ID (combined with a home button) is a lot faster. You can reach into your pocket or handbag, put the finger on the button and press it while you're taking it out. By the time your phone is out it's unlocked and on the home screen. I don't recall seeing people failing to unlock their phones while paying with Apple Pay before but now it's a reasonably common occurrence if they didn't "prime" it ahead of time. You can also quickly unlock your phone if it's not directly aligned with your face without having to pick it up (let's say it's on a table or desk) or if you're letting another person handle it. Face ID is also annoying in bed, when either your face is obstructed by pillows/blankets or if you're holding your phone too close to your face and need to hold it further away for a second, illuminating the whole room in the process. Touch ID also makes the authentication action explicit. If you're handling someone else's phone, you can look at the lockscreen without attempting to authenticate by simply keeping away from the home button and using the power button to wake it up. With Face ID the simple fact of looking at the phone is an authentication attempt and you'd be consuming the limited amount of attempts the owner has before they have to fall back to a passcode.

KerrickStaley 6y ago
One major downside of Touch ID that is niche but affects me personally is that if your fingerprints get damaged (e.g. by rock climbing, which I do regularly) then Touch ID will stop working for ~1 day while your fingers recover. For this reason I'm planning on getting a device with Face ID or a similar feature next time I buy a phone. The downsides of Face ID you mention are valid, though.
- sinatra 6y ago
  Add your two thumbs and two index fingers so that you can use any one of them depending on convenience or rare edge cases like rock climbing damage to one of them.
- jamil7 6y ago
  I have a scar across my left thumb from working in kitchens in my 20s and touchID seems really unreliable on that thumb.

killerdhmo 6y ago

This phone was designed, locked in place, and started manufacturing years ago.

mantap 6y ago
Adding a fingerprint scanner doesn't affect every component in the phone. It doesn't affect the display, CPU, dimensions or anything with a long lead time. It affects the power button. Apple had well enough time to add it.
- rimliu 6y ago
  Sometimes it takes _weeks_ to change some button on the _web_. You talk like this was a trivial change that could be made in a day.
- bhahn 6y ago
  Then why didn’t they? I would give them some benefit of the doubt to one of the biggest companies in the world that they had at least a dozen people research this and came to the conclusion that they couldn’t or didn’t want to (due to cost, design, etc).
  - willis936 6y ago
    The answer seems obvious: they are pigheadedly stubborn when it comes to design decisions. They will never throw away a design decision within 5 years because that would be admitting they made a sub-optimal decision at some point. It simply is not on brand.
  - mantap 6y ago
    The same reason that Apple shipped broken keyboards with MacBooks for years. Because Tim Cook is not a product person. He is an operations person. Adding a fingerprint sensor is good for the product but bad for operations. Who do you think he's going to side with? At the risk of using a cliche, I think Jobs would have made a different decision.
- ksec 6y ago

jen729w 6y ago

> Which I had to revert to an unsafe 6 digit one from my 12char alphanumeric A 6 character alphanumeric is still way safer than a 6 character numeric. Just pick something you can type as quickly as you can punch in 6 numbers?

swiley 6y ago

Personally I never used either. Biometric authentication just seems like a terrible idea to me and I really don't want my phone collecting data like that.

sgerenser 6y ago
iPhones don’t collect biometric data other than locally, and even then only in a form that would never be useful to anyone (hashed and stored on Secure Enclave).

armandhammer 6y ago

Weird, fully masked Face ID has worked fine for me since the iOS 13.5 update (more than 95% of the time). Before that it never worked with a mask on. And I wear the L size huge standard disposable white mask which covers nearly my entire face from the bottom of my eyelids, fully side to side, all the way over my chin.