Why FaceID could turn out to be the ultimate dampener for iPhone X
The iPhone X is undoubtedly an important landmark in the history of not just Apple, but also the smartphone industry. The first iPhone, announced on June 29, 2007, brought with it multi-touch capabilities – a technology that gave birth to the modern day smartphone, revolutionising for good how we interact with our phones. Ten years on, Apple wants to do the same again.
With the new device, the attempt is to bring futuristic technology, and design, wrapped in a package that, for better or worse, again revolutionises the way we interact and use our smartphones – something that Apple continuously stressed on during the launch of the flagship device at the Steve Jobs theatre. But, uncharacteristically, the tech giant chose to reach this goal by making sweeping changes to the decade-old DNA of the iPhone family.
"The future is here", it proclaimed after it unveiled the result of its efforts – essentially nothing more than an almost bezel-less phone that does away with the trusted home button in favour of face recognition tech. Speaking at the unveiling, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, added, “The first iPhone revolutionised a decade of technology and changed the world in the process... Now, 10 years later, it is only fitting that we are here in this place on this day to reveal a product that will set the path for technology for the next decade.”
The problem, however, is that for all its efforts, Apple has done anything but bring in a revolutionary product. Rather, in its attempts to stay ahead of the game, it has tried to push the consumers towards a future that not even the tech giant is ready for.
With the new device, all it has managed to incorporate - all in the name of new-age revolutionary technology - is its take on facial recognition, which it calls the FaceID.
Once set up, users can unlock their phones, pay for products and log into apps by holding the phone up to their face. Apple claims the technology behind FaceID is pretty sophisticated, with dedicated hardware and software resource being employed to create a detailed 3D model of the users face that Apple claims makes it almost 20 times more secure than the TouchID technology on its previous phones.
In terms of usability also FaceID would have a great impact on things, the company believes. This was highlighted by Apple exec Phil Schiller at the launch: "With the iPhone X, your iPhone is locked until you look at it and it recognizes you. Nothing has ever been more simple, natural, and effortless... This is the future of how we'll unlock our smartphones and protect our sensitive information."
But a closer look at the tech exposes how such claims are as far from reality as they can be.
Security concerns
In theory, FaceID with its TrueDepth camera system – a dot projector, infrared camera and flood illuminator – working in tandem with the dual-core Neural engine system on board the A11 Bionic chipset, should leave the iPhone X virtually hack-proof. However, looking at the history of facial recognition tech, these only appear to be fanciful claims.
In order for FaceID to become successful, Apple will have to overcome the deep-rooted flaws in the concept of facial recognition.
As Wired magazine highlights in a story, facial recognition has long been notoriously easy to defeat. In 2009, security researchers fooled facial recognition systems for a variety of laptops with nothing more than a printed photo of the laptop's owner held in front of its camera, while in 2015, popular science writer Dan Moren beat an Alibaba facial recognition system just by using a video that included himself blinking.
Granted, FaceID's TrueDepth system with its camera array that shoots 30,000 invisible dots to create a 3D model of the user's face in real-time is far sophisticated than technology of the past, but in the age of 3D printers where the exact model of a person's face can be made, security analysts insist Apple's facial recognition system may not be as air-tight as it wants us to believe.
But as Apple points out, there is no security system that's completely hack-proof, and hence, security concerns around FaceID, which Apple will look to introduce in future phones, may not be its biggest concern.
Inconvenient to use
However, one concern that could very well be the silver bullet to the technology's future is that it could prove to be slower and far less convenient to use than its TouchID tech.
You have to pick phone up, hold it to face at just the right angle, *then* wait a second for it to unlock. Goes from novel to annoying fast.
— JR Raphael (@JRRaphael) September 13, 2017
As the Business Insider points out in a report, as smartphones become more central to our daily lives, this inclusion of FaceID by dropping a fingerprint scanner could turn out to be a big problem for users who unlock their phones multiple times a day. The move will not only require users making a change to their habit of using a single touch to unlock and start navigating the phone's OS, but also force on them extra steps of picking up their phone and placing it in front of their face, and then swiping up to reach the phone's home screen.
These steps, will not just involve extra effort, but would also need extra time and attention to carry out a task that is as basic as unlocking one's phone.
The new FaceID system will also make it impossible to unlock the new iPhone in convenient ways that a fingerprint sensor allowed for. For example, users can't unlock a phone lying on a table in front of them without physically picking it up and bringing it in front of their face to unlock it.
FaceID being integrated with Apple pay and other payment systems would also make it impossible to simply touch and pay for products as it would require users to first bring the phone up to their face and then make the payment.
However, the biggest inconvenience the users will have to face because of the inclusion of the new FaceID tech will be when they want to share their phones with friends and family. Unlike TouchID, and other fingerprint scanning technologies, FaceID will not allow for multiple faces to be saved in the phone.
The iPhone X will only allow the principal user to unlock the phone, and that could by far pose to be the technology's biggest drawback. For users who like to share their device with family members, with FaceID, granting access even to your kids, siblings spouse etc would become impossible, unless, of course, they use the age-old trusted passwords to unlock the phone.
Not very forward thinking, is it Apple?