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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

I have a scar across my left thumb from working in kitchens in my 20s and touchID seems really unreliable on that thumb.

Good luck using your Face ID with a mask. At least you only had one day recovery time to use Touch ID.

The Pixel 3XL and others had it right - fingerprint sensor on the back (natural spot for your pointer finger), still allowing for the whole front of the device to be the screen.

This is definitely subjective because I love Face ID and haven't missed Touch ID once since I got my iPhone 11. And I loved Touch ID.

Note that I'm in a COVID-free part of Australia so I'm not affected by mask wearing.

There are COVID-free parts around the world that are not New Zealand?

If memory serves me right, Western Australia , South Australia and Tasmania haven't had local community transmission in months. Queensland had a couple of small outbreaks but seems to have been contained very quickly.

Plus our capital Canberra, situated in the tiny Australian Capital Territory. 113 cases total, the last back in July. :-)

https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZTY4NTI1NzQtYTBhYy00Z...

Everyone forgets about ACT,mate :)

Just how we like it.

And as a totally blind person, I don't look at my phone anyway, so faceID has been a major downgrade.

A lot faster? what are we talking about? 1/2 a second? faceID is great, you look at the phone and it unlocks, I much prefer it to touchid, I used to have to use my passcode far more often with touchID because It didn't get it quite right, or my fingers were wet, or using my other hand from an odd angle. And, with winter, you know, gloves...

Fingerprint auth is a lot faster because it's already unlocked before I look at the phone.

You can't USE your phone before you look at it, so the effective difference is the half second it takes for face id to unlock your phone.

Yes it's not huge difference so not a deal-breaker but the slight difference is detectable.

I disagree, I prefer Face ID. They just both have pros and cons.

If you're wearing gloves, Touch ID doesnt work. If you're wearing a mask, Face ID doesnt work. If your finger is a bit wet and/or wrinkly, Touch ID doesnt work. If your face is at a very off angle Face ID won't work.

Face ID worked pretty well for me (before mask time) and for me it had less tradeoffs. I prefer it.

> combined with a home button

Or right in the display. The optical fingerprint scanner OnePlus uses is very nice.

I have to disagree. Both systems have advantages over the other, and of course with a mask on TouchID has a pretty big advantage right now. But:

- FaceID is way better when your fingers are not perfect: after washing hands, in the kitchen, when wearing gloves etc.

- FaceID is more secure (lower chance of a false positive)

- FaceID already starts working when you pick up the phone (you do not need to trigger it), so by the time I swipe up to unlock, it has already long since identified my face

- FaceID enabled you to hide the content of notifications and only show them when you look at the phone

FaceID gave access to my phone to a malicious house guest of a guest (boyfriend of sister who was unreasonably convinced of my disapproving of him, self fulfilling in this case ) who unlocked my phone using my face while I slept and even managed to authorize expenditure on my wallet.

Odd, as this shouldn't be possible - Face ID checks your eyes are open and are looking at the screen before it unlocks (unless you disable Attention-Aware Unlock in Accessibility settings).

Machine learning is never 100%. False positives are always possible.

Presumably he would have pressed your finger on the TouchID too, or just cut your thumb off if he's willing to go the next step. Hard to hold the phone manufacturer at fault for a case like this, right?

Do you have Require Attention for FaceID enabled in the settings panel?

> by the time I swipe up to unlock, it has already long since identified my face

With Touch ID and a home button I do not have to swipe up to unlock - in the accessibility settings there is a "rest finger to open" option which brings back the pre-iOS10 (or around that time) behavior where the lockscreen is dismissed as soon as your finger is recognized.

This means that before I even take out the phone out of my pocket it is already unlocked and is on the home screen ready to be used. You can even start opening apps purely through muscle memory while you're taking the phone out.

Have you ever used FaceID? There are a lot of false claims in your rant.

My favourite was the room being illuminated (by IR light?) when using FaceID in bed.

Yes I have used Face ID. I actually tried to force myself to like the new phone by "dual-wielding" both my iPhone 8 and a new iPhone XS for a couple weeks. I ended up sticking to my iPhone 8 and keeping the other one as a test device for iOS development.

By illuminating the room I meant illuminating from the light of the screen, not IR. When using it in bed I can keep a Touch ID device under a blanket as to not illuminate the rest of the room, but Face ID performs poorly in that case and I have to take the phone out completely so the light does leak.

> 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.

I was excited when I discovered this, but I now consider this “feature” to be a security issue. I used to “prime” my Touch ID-equipped iPhones until I accidental authorized an in-app purchase because my thumb was pre-placed on the sensor.

Never again.

I had modified the Accessibility settings so that resting a finger on the sensor would unlock the device, and when reverting that setting I still ran into the same issue.

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.

There's nothing forcing them to release new phones now instead of delaying and releasing a better product.

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.

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.

I guess they'll move to iris unlock

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.

From an asian person who often wear mask in winter, I wish Apple adopts Fingerprint (or iris) auth forever.

Perhaps they’ll reconsider their decisions when the sales numbers come in.

Sure.

Apple could not release a new iPhone in time for the holidays.

That's a thing they could do.

Why would they ever do that though? Like ever.

10s of billions in profit is forcing them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A face mask that does not cover the nose is equivalent to no mask.

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.

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?

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.

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...

Realistically, with cheap masks you really can’t. I tried all the “life hacks” suggested and none of them work, some fogging inevitably happens.

The only way is to get a proper N95 or N99 mask, which has padded edges that make for a proper seal. You’ll also be safer.

Literally impossible if you have a big nose.

Maybe it's useless for not getting virus, but it works not to spread virus while talking.

Your mask still covers your nose, just not the whole nose. I'd say covering your nose up to 80% works fine.

Interesting idea, though I’m not sure this is a good idea. Exposing one’s nose defeats the purpose of wearing the mask.

As an aside, I’m super curious to see whether Face ID works with the transparent PurME masks.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/purme-a-gas-mask-you-can-...

> 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?

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

It effect the wireless signals, especially with 5G which means it will need to be retested again. Especially when Apple is using the frame as Antenna.

This is far easier on an iPad which has that design decision made up front.

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