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Comment by lwansbrough | Hacker News Reader

Touch ID is an entirely superior technology and Apple is profoundly stupid for removing it. It doesn't have to be in the screen, just put it on the back. The lengths they'll go to offset the removal of Touch ID are astounding, from IR face tracking, to degraded biometric security, and now to requiring an Apple Watch to unlock the phone with your mask on. Talk about a Rube Goldberg machine.

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Sorry, it’s not. Face ID: Just pick up your phone and your phone automatically unlocks with your face. This experience is way superior than having to position your finger at a specific place every time you want to unlock it. Putting it on the back is even worse, you need to actually pick up your phone from the desk just to unlock it. I swear HN readers would create devices with the worst UX possible.

I like Face ID with phones. For iPad, getting the angle right for the face to be recognized seems trickier, so overall the Touch ID experience was superior.

I've actually found the opposite to be true - my iPad Pro will Face ID happily in any orientation and quite far off centre, whereas my face has to be very much centred for my iPhone to do the same.

Probably you have the "requires attention" mode activated on your phone.

I have "Require Attention" enabled on both devices.

I'd argue that when I used to pick my phone up, I'd place my thumb on the touch ID location as I was raising the phone to my face and it would unlock quicker than face ID.

I don't have a problem with either options, but I do think touch ID was slightly faster.

If you haven’t unlocked your phone by the time you’re looking at it you’re doing it slower than I am. Typically my phone is unlocked before I’ve even fully pulled it out of my pocket. The muscle memory for thumb (or finger placement if it’s on the back) is a pretty low barrier to usability, and can be learned quickly.

Can you unlock your phone without moving it in front of your face? I can, if it’s sitting across my desk I can unlock it without picking it up or moving my head towards it. I do this regularly.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten how many usability compromises you’ve made in using Face ID, but I guarantee it’s slower.

> Perhaps you’ve forgotten how many usability compromises you’ve made in using Face ID, but I guarantee it’s slower

Counterpoint: with Face ID, if my phone is facing me I can interact with it just by looking in its direction.

Got a message while I'm at my desk? I look at it, it unlocks and shows me the notification. Cooking and a timer goes off? I look at it, it lowers the volume of the alarm.

Everything has trade-offs and different people use stuff in different ways, but I personally prefer Face ID to Touch ID.

but what do you if you don't want it to unlock? like if you were in work and someone send you a nsfw message that you don't want your coworkers to see, or maybe you are in a car with other people etc etc. ...there's no way to stop that right?

at least with a fingerprint reader you can choose to glance at the lockscreen messages first before unlocking

Just looking at the screen does not unlock the device as you still need to swipe up to close the lockscreen. Before that, it does exactly as you describe, shows a glance on the lockscreen.

To clarify, it does unlock the phone - i.e. you are authenticated as you after you look at it - but you're right that it doesn't open the full message unless you tap on the notification.

You can disable the attention-aware features if you want to, even independent of Face ID itself, and it obviously respects DND settings.

I keep notification contents hidden while the phone is locked anyway, so I'd need to authenticate before it shows me the message in either case.

they both have their place, but with touchid my phone is often unlocked before i even look at it or without looking at it which is nice at times.

It's not "way superior" it's just different and slightly easier.

I have a dry skin and Touch ID works for me 50% if I'm lucky.

I have sweaty skin and my success rate is at least as bad as yours. I confess to be very surprised at the love for TouchID here. I've used both TouchID and FaceID and I find the success rate of the latter to be much better. Perhaps we, dry and sweaty skins, are edge cases and most people apparently have 'normal' skin?

After skateboarding my success rate is close to zero...

Also a sweaty skin person here and can confirm, never liked TouchID because of how little it worked for me and was very happy when FaceID came out.

Both is fine with me. FaceID is great for any time you've got gloves on.

I wish they had an external version of it, e.g. an apple keyboard with touchID or support for generic webcams for FaceID so it'd work when docked, etc.

The new iMac has it on its external wireless keyboard.

So it's coming, just slowly.

FaceID surely won't ever work with webcams however -- it uses a custom-built depth sensor separate from the camera.

> FaceID surely won't ever work with webcams however -- it uses a custom-built depth sensor separate from the camera.

iMacs could absolutely have the entire camera module, depth sensor included. Things would be rather more complicated for the laptops, the cover is thinner than an iPhone. Though obviously not as bad as the protruding back cameras, the front cameras module is still rather deep and would likely require increasing the depth of the cover to fit flush.

On the Windows side you can find Windows Hello certified third party cameras with the necessary IR and depth sensors. (I've seen Intel and Logitech options in stores.) Since the death of the Kinect the cost has generally gone way back up as it is a niche of a niche just to support easier logins and few applications anymore are using the IR/depth sensors as much (though even this far past the Kinect, Windows itself has additional eye tracking/attention tracking features these days than it ever had before for accessibility reasons).

Surely Apple could release a FaceID-compatible USB webcam if they wished. It's probably less likely for them to FaceID certify third party hardware, though.

(That said, I think Apple's other excuse for not supporting FaceID on more hardware is it uses the ML capabilities of some of their mobile A* chipsets. Maybe another thing they might claim can only be done with M1+ macOS.)

Plain webcams don't have the 3d/infrared tech that FaceID uses.

The Apple Watch has a nice function where it can substitute for TouchID/password entry for things like unlocking your Mac, authorizing changes to settings, unlocking 1Password etc.

Makes using my laptop docked way more enjoyable.

https://support.apple.com/guide/watch/unlock-your-mac-with-a...

I used to think that way, then I was forced (through damaged previous device) to consider a FaceID phone and I'm sold now.

Cooking with TouchID is an exercise in frustration.

Ideally I'd like them to be able to combine auth mechanisms but we can't have everything.

Apple Watch is not required; it is a convenience option that can be used to unlock the phone if you are masked.

What I said was "requiring an Apple Watch to unlock the phone with your mask on", so I'm not sure what you're correcting.

You can always unlock a phone with your mask on with a passcode. The Apple Watch method is an added convenience, not a "requirement".

Another reason to buy an Apple Watch. It works out perfectly for Apple.

Completely agree. The new iPad Air even got it integrated in the sleep button, so Apple has the ability to continue offering Touch ID on all devices and keep the full screen display.

Apple should bring the same Touch ID-enabled power button to the iPhone that they have on the new iPad Air. That would make both the Touch ID and Face ID folks happy.

touch id never works - i've tried it a ton of times, and it eventually forgets my fingerprints or something, and just stops working... max it works is like 2 weeks, then... it's like i'm a new person. I have even tried training the same finger lots of different times, still no luck. And I've tried it on iphone and mac, no go.

I have sweaty palms most of the time so Touch ID has been a massive problem for me.

Putting TouchID on the back would render it unusable for me due to my phone case.

Cases can (and do, for other devices) have a hole in the back for the fingerprint scanner

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