But you gain the convenience of unlocking your phone while wearing gloves, having dirty/wet hands, for people with callouses/scarring/other finger issues that have prevented Touch ID from ever functioning reliably (or at all), using a heavier duty cases, etc. Certainly there are tradeoffs here, but arguments to the effect that Touch ID is already the be-all end-all of biometric authentication have a strong odor of argument-from-familiarity. I remember many debates when Touch ID was first introduced that were topologically similar to debates now happening around Face ID. It's not as if Touch ID doesn't have friction points, we've just gotten used to working around them and/or living with them. But that doesn't mean authentication tech is "done".

The ideal of course would simply be to have both (preferably with some user control about using one or the other or both). While some of the functional use space they cover overlaps (as would other methods like retina scanning), it's definitely true that they have use cases which are independent. There isn't any inherent need for it to be a zero-sum game.

However, Apple is already apparently having significant trouble getting the X produced, apparently getting both into it was an impossible reach for this year, and at the end of the day "real artists ship". Touch ID was not refined when it first shipped, it got more accurate and much, much faster over time, it was merely "good enough to get the ball rolling", but at some point that stage of things is needed. It's a tradeoff that's a challenge to get right and people can argue about where the balance is in any given instance, but I think Apple has been pretty consistent about being willing to bite the bullet and get the cycle of refinement going at a stage just before full refinement, and I'm not sure they're wrong, or that the level of refinement they've managed to reach with other products would be possible as quickly without getting it out there and in real world use.

I’m pretty sure you can tune a parameter to trade off false negatives and false positives. If it has too many false negatives, you adjust it so that it doesn’t. Apple’s false positive rates surely come with an implied “at some acceptably small false negative rate.”

> But it will be the false negatives that will by far be the most annoying and noticeable.

How do you know that's what it means? You have literally no idea if this report is even true, or what the implications of it would be if it were true.

People are drawing a lot of conclusions from an unsubstantiated report on a brand new unreleased feature for a phone that nobody has yet and has never used in the wild.

Touch ID for my right hand usually stops working in a few weeks, and I have to delete and add those fingers/thumb back in. (Probably related to diabetes)

My Google Pixel XL (it's a testing device) has the same issue it seems.

I'm hoping Face ID will be more reliable.

They’ll pull fingerprints off your phone to defeat Touch ID. Unless the photo attack is substantially better (and given the 3D scanning tech used by Face ID, I doubt it), Face ID is still a win.

Edit: why “again”? What was the last time?

People probably don’t post a lot of 3D infrared scans of their face online, which is what FaceId uses.

(They also don’t leave them all over on the things they touch, like they do with finger prints.)

Also, I don’t know of your “lying with statistics” claim is fair. Of course, statistics are a great way to lie since you can have a mathematical certainly that what you are claiming is numerically accurate while at the same time give a false impression through selecting the numbers to present.

However, in this case, the implication is that FaceID is more precise and secure than Touch ID, which is probably true if it works the way they claim. (Well, we don’t really know that yet, but we don’t know the opposite yet, either.)

I had the same thought. It’s likely that the 1 million number is after the change. Either way, the larger point remains.

I don’t get how it’s marketing BS, when they described it just like you say.

The iPhone X won't look at 2D flat bitmaps of someone's face. It will be looking at a moving 3D map of someone's face.

Except that Face ID does not work on photos at all. It's a 3d technology and requires the phone's 3d sensors (more than one) for recognising the face.

If their number is correct, there are only about 7,000 lookalikes on the planet for any given user. Tracking one down and convincing them to participate in your nefarious scheme seems non-trivial. And remember that you must accomplish this within a fairly short time period (48 hours?) and two failures will lock you out for good.

If you’re the target of an attack by a sophisticated organization like an intelligence agency or a large industrial espionage operation, they might be able to pull this off. Common criminals will just break the phone up for parts. And either way, it’s better than fingerprints.

I've got a bet with a buddy that a properly trained FaceID doesn't get cracked or fooled inside a year or does inside 6 months.

We'll see soon enough, it's a tempting target.

Both of them are basically "logins". They are not secure and they can't be changed ever. Neither can't be a sole security instrument.