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Comment by S_A_P | Hacker News Reader

I have thought long and hard about upgrading my iPhone 8 to one of the new X models, but I don't like the lack of a home button. I guess I am officially old now, but I dont want to look at my phone to unlock it. I like that I can reach in my pocket, and unlock it with my thumb as I retrieve it. It may be user error, but I see several co-workers have to really train the phone on their face to unlock with Face ID. That would drive me nuts. the swipe up gesture just seems annoying, and on my iPhone 8 is unreliable to bring up the control panel. they need to do what they did before and copy the other vendors that put the fingerprint reader on the back of the phone so that the nice bezel free design can be implemented.

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I was an early adopter of iPhone X and the following year with XS Max, from my experience any unfamiliarity with FaceID is extremely short-lived, I wouldn't go back to a home button which feels archaic at this point and unnecessarily takes up valuable real-estate that should go towards a larger screen. The gestures also become fluid and second nature after a while.

Even the next Pixel4 is moving to using FaceID, going back to a home button or fingerprint scanner would be a step backwards.

I like the gestures, but the unpredictability of when FaceID is going to work is maddening. Sometimes it works with sunglasses, sometimes not. Sometimes it works in the dim light of my bedroom, sometimes not. Sometimes it works when I absolutely don't expect it (half my face hidden in my pillow, towel wrapped around my face, complete darkness with face illuminated only by my lock screen) which only fools me into half expecting it to work when I shouldn't. Sometimes everything seems right, but it still doesn't work. I'm never completely taken by surprise because I'm never sure what will happen.

In other words, about a hundred times a day my train of thought is interrupted for a second or two while I stare at my phone and wonder if FaceID is going to work. This is a pretty terrible pattern of disruption. Technology should disappear into the background instead of inserting itself into the foreground of my attention every time I use it. The fingerprint home button was more reliable, and it was much easier to anticipate when it was going to fail because of a wet or dirty thumb.

When I am running and my hand is sweaty, it was impossible to unlock my old phone with fingerprint reader. Face ID works great in that case. I would say the fingerprint reader was the worst thing about my old phone. Granted I don't know how much better recent iPhone readers are in comparison but I expect they still have issues with wet or dirty hands.

TouchID fails because of a wet or dirty thumb.

FaceID fails when your face is not fully visible.

FaceID fails when your face is not fully visible.

That would be nice and simple if it were true, but it's not. Sometimes it fails when my face is fully visible. Sometimes it works when my face is not fully visible. It can work or not work with the same pair of sunglasses depending on... who knows? Maybe I'm just not smart enough to figure out the exact meaning of "fully visible."

Try retraining FaceID without glasses/headwear, when standing up and holding the phone in front of your face at similar height. Anecdotally, it adapts better to sunglasses/etc. that way.

Also when it fails with sunglasses, and ask for password the first time, immediately logging in with passport will make subsequent unlocks with sunglasses work better (presumably it marks that face adaptation as "correct").

Face ID does not need light to work. It projects its own grid of IR dots.

Is that going to help me know when it will work or not? I doubt it. I shouldn't need to be spinning theories about how it works anyway.

TouchID improved over time/iterations, as will FaceID. Can't be stuck in the present.

Agree, new UX sans home buttons is amazing. I was a sceptic but ended up buying XS outright as it didn’t make sense to spend so much money on a XR and not get the camera. It’s an amazing device.

I was skeptical as well coming from my iPhone 6+ to the Xs... but it turns out that it just works and works fine. I wasn't missing my home button after about a day or two. Switching between iPad and iPhone is slightly awkward now, as I am sometimes waiting for my iPad to unlock on facial recognition and it never happens.

FWIW I was similarly skeptical. As others have mentioned, swiping up becomes a very natural motion. And I have sweaty fingers that confounded the fingerprint reader, so Face ID was actually a huge improvement in recognition rates for me. Looking squarely at the phone becomes second nature (because what else are your neck and wrist muscles doing?), and the only times I need to type a passcode are when I need to unlock the phone while lying down.

I don't like the lack of a home button

I resisted the button-less form until my buttoned iPhone broke, and I got a hand-me-down X.

Now when I use my iPad, which has a button, there's a brief moment of indignation, "What!? I have to touch a button to unlock this thing!?" every time I use it. It's funny how quickly we get used to things.

That said, I wish the phone wouldn't unlock when I'm just looking at the screen sometimes.

I thought it was going to take me forever to get used to the swipe up action, but honestly, it took minutes.

I really like(d) the ability to unlock my phone as it laid flat on my desk using touchid, but my FaceID experience has been virtually flawless.

I really couldn't go back to the huge black bar across the bottom.

While I cannot comment on the rest, Face ID has proven to work surprisingly well for me, beating even the wildest expectations.

The unlock time seems to be less than half a second, so as I look at the phone, it is already unlocked.

And the detection is really good too. After I shaved my long beard and went fully clean-faced, FaceID had zero issues unlocking the phone with zero hiccups for me.

> FaceID had zero issues unlocking the phone

It will let a sibling in too, or at least at a point in the past.

Honest question, when you say "sibling", do you mean an identical twin? Because if yes, then fingerprint sensor won't save you from that either.

After googling for a bit, I think I found what you have been referencing. Turns out, FaceID learns as it goes, even from non-successful attempts. So if every time your non-identical-twin sister tries to unlock your phone using FaceID, fails, and then you immediately unlock it for her with your face or password, then the system will slowly over time learn to recognize her face as well. This makes sense to me.

Identical twins have different fingerprints. Though they may look superficially similar, they would definitely be different enough that it is extremely unlikely to be able to unlock each other's phones.

Just brothers: https://hackernoon.com/my-younger-brother-can-access-my-ipho...

I’m even older than you apparently, but I just don’t see the attraction of the bezel-less design. I like bezels, they:

- let me hold the phone without blocking the screen

- act as a buffer for cracks: a smaller crack in the corner (the most common kind in my experience) won’t affect your experience.

- mean I don’t have to deal with notches or curved displays

Privilege check: I have large hands, I can single-handedly operate my iPhone 8 Plus with little difficulty. I could see bezel-less allowing greater ease of use for people not like me. If that overcomes the points above... so be it. I’m keeping my 8 Plus for now though.

Have you actually used a bezel-less device? They’ve sold hundreds of millions of them. I think it would be a scandal much like the laptop keyboards if their software for ignoring accidental input at the screen edge wasn’t essentially flawless.

what gives you the impression that I believe their software for ignoring accidental input is flawed?

I agree, especially on iPad, a bezel is a necessary place to rest a thumb to hold the device

Yeah, I think you are forced to re-train how you pickup and use the phone. An older non-smartphone could be easily picked up by grabbing the entire girth of the phone. With smartphones, people learned to pick it up using the side edges without triggering any touch interactions. Old-folks found this confusing as they constantly kept inadvertently dialing someone or launching random apps. At-least with the change from non-smartphones you got a bump in functionality, the face-id change seems to be entirely superficial to me. I'm still rocking my 6s, but will have to eventually upgrade when Apple slows down my phone with their updates. I held on to my 4s too till it became unbearably slow..

One feature I'd upgrade for is if Apple completely sealed off their phone and made it waterproof.

> I dont want to look at my phone to unlock it

You can turn this off in Settings.

It's fine. At least on the new Galaxy phones, the haptic feedback works almost like its a real button (and I'm assuming it's similar on the iphone).

Iphones 7 and 8 already have a 'virtual' home button using haptic feedback--I assume this is what you mean. X-factor iphones use a gesture-based system instead of any kind of button.

I broke my home button and lost touch ID. For a while until I could replace the home button, I used the software home button which floats on your screen. The actual home button for navigation isn't really needed and swipe gesture is a natural evolution of that. However I would prefer fingerprint to face biometrics is what I discovered during this physical home button-less period.

There is a Face ID setting to require attention that you can disable which would then allow you to unlock the phone without looking at it. Of course, your face still has to be in front of the phone somewhere, but your gaze needn’t be on the device.

I found it took getting used to my Surface Pro unlocking when I look at it, but now I resent my work laptop which doesn't support Hello. I expect to have the same arc with iPhones once I go past an 8.

The X is superb. Upgrade! So long as it’s not a big financial stretch, you won’t regret it.

I'm fairly shocked to find that a community of seemingly technically competent people would forfeit their 4th amendment rights in order to save a few seconds keying in a passcode. This small detail feels like a microcosm of tech in general currently :/

You might unlock your phone 10,000 or 100,000 times over its lifetime. It is just a hugely convenient thing to have that work as quickly as possible, without needing to enter a passcode every time. How likely is it that you will experience an unexpected breach of your 4th amendment rights where you don't have time to disable biometric access to your phone in advance, especially as the iPhone has a 'panic button' specifically to do this quickly. Face ID requires you to look at the phone anyway so in theory it's simple to avoid giving access to a cop.

Who’s forfeiting anything? If you don’t want to unlock your device for law enforcement, just use the sleep/lock button to make your phone require the passcode (which the police can’t legally compel you to give, I believe). It takes several seconds to key in a reasonably secure passcode, and it ceases to be secure if you type it in view of any security cameras. Also, if you open your phone 50 times per day, it’s way more than just a few seconds.

You're counting on your ability to (and memory to carry out) access and disable your phone after encountering law enforcement?

The fourth amendment covers search and seizure by the government, not the willful disclosure of information to a company by a user.

But I get what you mean. Even without getting into my inherent distrust of facial recognition systems and the security/privacy implications of creating the infrastructure for it to work reliably, biometrics are usernames. They shouldn't be used as passwords.

I wasn't clear with what I meant, sorry. I was referring to how face unlock can be compelled but passwords cannot, though I realize now this is actually 5th amendment.

Any time I'm about to go through security, I long-press the volume and side buttons which immmediately activates the requirement for passcode to unlock.

It's a quick and easy shortcut to enable the passcode requirement.

Thank you. Reading the comments on HN always leaves me wondering if I'm the only one that doesn't have any interest in any kind of biometric unlock feature.

The kind of person who thinks this way used to be quite prevalent on HN but they've slowly disappeared. Unclear if they've simply aged out if reading HN and younger folks don't understand this mentality or if somehow HN is not preferring this mindset in general now. It's definitely missed though.

Fingerprint reader is convenient, but were I to travel a lot, I'd disable it.

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