Taking a look back at another week of news from Cupertino, this week’s Apple Loop includes the problems with FaceID, more updates to fix iOS 11, new details on the iPhone SE2, how Apple is still winning the profit war, the iPhone X lead time, and a look at some wireless charging pads.
Apple Loop is here to remind you of a few of the very many discussions that have happened around Apple over the last seven days (and you can read my weekly digest of Android news here on Forbes).
From a technical point of view, FaceID on the new iPhone X is marvellous. Meanwhile in the real world the practicality of facial recognition remains to be seen. Apple’s new smartphone offers FaceID but not TouchID. For those with experience of TouchID, the move to FaceID can be seen as a backwards step, as Sanjiv Sathiah explains:
here is nothing natural about having to deliberately put your iPhone X in front of your face every time you want unlock it or authenticate a transaction. It might be technically more secure than the already robust Touch ID, but it still requires a less convenient, deliberate action on your part. Touch ID does not have a single one of the caveats listed above. As Apple would say, "it just works." Of course, it is still available as a feature on the iPhone 8, but that design is ancient by normal tech standards — even if it almost matches the iPhone X spec-for-spec. Face ID might be a state-of-the-art piece of biometric security tech, but a device shouldn’t force me to adapt to how it wants to work; it should adapt to how I want it to work.
I turned Face ID off and reverted to a 4-digit passcode and it is a huge improvement in usability. Enough said