iPhone X Facial Recognition
This is a supremely funny one to talk about after discussing security concerns with smart locks, but there is a lot more going on here.
So let's start.
Security concerns. If you're the type of person who read my posts on Smart Lock security and said "no F'ing way I'm potentially granting the government unauthorized access to my house" but you plan to buy an iPhone X... please smack yourself. Hard. For me. Others have pointed this out... Touch ID requires someone to force you to touch your phone to unlock it. So a border agent for instance could be denied access to your phone (you may subsequently be denied access to the country, but at least you control your privacy). iPhone X... they hold your phone close to your face. Unlocked. Oops! And that is all I'll write on that.
Here is the thing I have against the iPhone X and the facial recognition. It removes a more secure form of authentication (Touch ID) and replaces it with a slower and less reliable one. It is also less futuristic and more easily spoofed. Literally everything about Face ID is worse than Touch ID.
But the biggest rub is... there are recommended distances to hold the phone and ideal conditions. Apple spent a goodly deal of their past assaulting other companies for building things that were unintuitive or forced their users to adapt. And now, their marquee feature is all that and more. It isn't just unintuitive and unreliable, it actually goes out of it's way to replace a feature which did a better job.
I'm getting really sick and tired of saying this: Steve Jobs would never have allowed this product to see the light of day.
The notch? I think many would say Jobs wouldn't approve of that either. I'm less sure on that. There are certainly animations where it looks awkward, but generally, it is unobtrusive, could be seen as "fashionable" and most importantly, it is functional. I think there are certainly valid argument on both sides. Which interestingly enough was often a hallmark of Jobs's more controversial product decisions.
The stuff I feel reasonably safe saying he'd trash is the stuff which is objectively worse than either an existing Apple solution or a competitors. Face ID is not only worse than Touch ID, it even seems worse than Windows Hello. Yeah, it is trying to cram something akin to Windows Hello in an itty bitty space. I get it. It is cool and super advanced. At the end of the day though, the gamble didn't pay off. It isn't good enough yet.
I want to be 100% clear on this. I'm not against facial recognition. I'm not even against facial recognition of the calibre present on the iPhone X. This is only noteworthy of facial recognition of this calibre as the sole biometric unlocking capability on the single most expensive mainstream phone.
My opinion. Apple should have delayed the iPhone X until they were able to get the finger print sensor in the screen and offer Face ID as an optional alternative. Heck, maybe by the time they figured out the Touch ID sensor for the iPhone X, they'd have made Face ID even better.
So, how is it objectively worse than Touch ID? Effective unlock speed, reliability, user experience and conditions which degrade performance.
Effective unlock speed is how long it takes to unlock the phone once out of your pocket. Reviewers are acting as though it is a good thing that it is faster than Apple's 1st gen Touch ID sensor. This misses a critical fact. I can use a fingerprint to unlock my phone WHILE I'm picking it up. I can get an effective unlock time of 0s, or even negative seconds depending on how you want to score this. And, by measuring it up against older hardware rather than current gen Touch ID it allows you to gloss over the fact it isn't just effectively slower, it is also ACTUALLY slower. And there is NO way as a user to improve upon it. The only way to fix this is to have Face ID be as faster or faster than current gen Touch ID.
Reliability is how often it correctly unlocks. Based on what I've read, it only matches Touch ID for accuracy for some people and only in ideal conditions. This means the overall accuracy is worse. End of story. The fix is simple, accuracy needs to be improved either through software or hardware.
User experience is a knock against it because part of those ideal conditions involve holding the phone at an appropriate angle and within a predefined range of distances. Unfortunately, that angle and those distances may not be natural for everyone. That means you need to change your habits to match your phone, just to get an accuracy rating that still only matches Touch ID in ideal lighting conditions. If the phone could be trained to adapt to user preferred angles and distances it would eliminate this point.
Lastly is a point touched on earlier. Some reviewers noted that in direct sunlight or any lighting source emitting more IR light than usual can cause Face ID to take a hit on accuracy. Sometimes I need to unlock my phone outside. And I can't control the lighting everywhere I go, nor should I be expected to even if I can. Again, the fix is simple, overall accuracy needs to be improved.
Now that I've gone and said all of this, I'll circle back and partially negate everything I just said for the fun of it. As I conceded in my Pixel 2 post, even flagship phones make compromises. They just tend to make fewer than less expensive phones. I'm not really sure this is any different. The iPhone X I'm sure ticks a heck of a lot of boxes comparatively. And probably ticks more than the iPhone 8 models. I'm not really interested in iPhone so I can't really tell you if it is worth the money.
I'd say, like the Pixel 2 XL pOLED issues, it seems like a phone with some compromises which are getting more press than usual because they aren't the sort of compromises a flagship phone usually makes. But, which probably wouldn't actually bother the average user all that much. People will say it is inexcusable but ultimately, that decision is up to the buyer who probably isn't buying the phone outright anyway.
I also want to circle back and say, none of this changes my position on the Steve Jobs comment either. This is exactly the sort of thing every biography, documentary and interview depicted him rallying against. It is a marquee feature and it is demonstrably worse than one it replaces. To make things worse, if you're using this feature it is your very first experience with the phone every single time you go to use it. In short, while none of this means it is a terrible phone or implies that it won't or shouldn't sell well, it is (in my opinion) anathema on some levels to what made Apple designs popular in the first place.
So let's start.
Security concerns. If you're the type of person who read my posts on Smart Lock security and said "no F'ing way I'm potentially granting the government unauthorized access to my house" but you plan to buy an iPhone X... please smack yourself. Hard. For me. Others have pointed this out... Touch ID requires someone to force you to touch your phone to unlock it. So a border agent for instance could be denied access to your phone (you may subsequently be denied access to the country, but at least you control your privacy). iPhone X... they hold your phone close to your face. Unlocked. Oops! And that is all I'll write on that.
Here is the thing I have against the iPhone X and the facial recognition. It removes a more secure form of authentication (Touch ID) and replaces it with a slower and less reliable one. It is also less futuristic and more easily spoofed. Literally everything about Face ID is worse than Touch ID.
But the biggest rub is... there are recommended distances to hold the phone and ideal conditions. Apple spent a goodly deal of their past assaulting other companies for building things that were unintuitive or forced their users to adapt. And now, their marquee feature is all that and more. It isn't just unintuitive and unreliable, it actually goes out of it's way to replace a feature which did a better job.
I'm getting really sick and tired of saying this: Steve Jobs would never have allowed this product to see the light of day.
The notch? I think many would say Jobs wouldn't approve of that either. I'm less sure on that. There are certainly animations where it looks awkward, but generally, it is unobtrusive, could be seen as "fashionable" and most importantly, it is functional. I think there are certainly valid argument on both sides. Which interestingly enough was often a hallmark of Jobs's more controversial product decisions.
The stuff I feel reasonably safe saying he'd trash is the stuff which is objectively worse than either an existing Apple solution or a competitors. Face ID is not only worse than Touch ID, it even seems worse than Windows Hello. Yeah, it is trying to cram something akin to Windows Hello in an itty bitty space. I get it. It is cool and super advanced. At the end of the day though, the gamble didn't pay off. It isn't good enough yet.
I want to be 100% clear on this. I'm not against facial recognition. I'm not even against facial recognition of the calibre present on the iPhone X. This is only noteworthy of facial recognition of this calibre as the sole biometric unlocking capability on the single most expensive mainstream phone.
My opinion. Apple should have delayed the iPhone X until they were able to get the finger print sensor in the screen and offer Face ID as an optional alternative. Heck, maybe by the time they figured out the Touch ID sensor for the iPhone X, they'd have made Face ID even better.
So, how is it objectively worse than Touch ID? Effective unlock speed, reliability, user experience and conditions which degrade performance.
Effective unlock speed is how long it takes to unlock the phone once out of your pocket. Reviewers are acting as though it is a good thing that it is faster than Apple's 1st gen Touch ID sensor. This misses a critical fact. I can use a fingerprint to unlock my phone WHILE I'm picking it up. I can get an effective unlock time of 0s, or even negative seconds depending on how you want to score this. And, by measuring it up against older hardware rather than current gen Touch ID it allows you to gloss over the fact it isn't just effectively slower, it is also ACTUALLY slower. And there is NO way as a user to improve upon it. The only way to fix this is to have Face ID be as faster or faster than current gen Touch ID.
Reliability is how often it correctly unlocks. Based on what I've read, it only matches Touch ID for accuracy for some people and only in ideal conditions. This means the overall accuracy is worse. End of story. The fix is simple, accuracy needs to be improved either through software or hardware.
User experience is a knock against it because part of those ideal conditions involve holding the phone at an appropriate angle and within a predefined range of distances. Unfortunately, that angle and those distances may not be natural for everyone. That means you need to change your habits to match your phone, just to get an accuracy rating that still only matches Touch ID in ideal lighting conditions. If the phone could be trained to adapt to user preferred angles and distances it would eliminate this point.
Lastly is a point touched on earlier. Some reviewers noted that in direct sunlight or any lighting source emitting more IR light than usual can cause Face ID to take a hit on accuracy. Sometimes I need to unlock my phone outside. And I can't control the lighting everywhere I go, nor should I be expected to even if I can. Again, the fix is simple, overall accuracy needs to be improved.
Now that I've gone and said all of this, I'll circle back and partially negate everything I just said for the fun of it. As I conceded in my Pixel 2 post, even flagship phones make compromises. They just tend to make fewer than less expensive phones. I'm not really sure this is any different. The iPhone X I'm sure ticks a heck of a lot of boxes comparatively. And probably ticks more than the iPhone 8 models. I'm not really interested in iPhone so I can't really tell you if it is worth the money.
I'd say, like the Pixel 2 XL pOLED issues, it seems like a phone with some compromises which are getting more press than usual because they aren't the sort of compromises a flagship phone usually makes. But, which probably wouldn't actually bother the average user all that much. People will say it is inexcusable but ultimately, that decision is up to the buyer who probably isn't buying the phone outright anyway.
I also want to circle back and say, none of this changes my position on the Steve Jobs comment either. This is exactly the sort of thing every biography, documentary and interview depicted him rallying against. It is a marquee feature and it is demonstrably worse than one it replaces. To make things worse, if you're using this feature it is your very first experience with the phone every single time you go to use it. In short, while none of this means it is a terrible phone or implies that it won't or shouldn't sell well, it is (in my opinion) anathema on some levels to what made Apple designs popular in the first place.
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