This year, Apple has a little bit of a different lineup when it comes to its phones. The iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus are more traditional, and look similar to past offerings, with Touch ID still intact. The iPhone X, the potentially more popular option, aims to show the world what Apple can do when it pulls out the big guns. While looks are always subjective, there is one important feature that is missing from the $999 smartphone, and that's the iconic Touch ID sensor. The firm has done away with the technology of the past and has introduced everyone to the future with Face ID.
If unfamiliar, Face ID only requires the user to look at the phone to unlock it, and even authorize payments using Apple Pay. This is accomplished using a TrueDepth camera embedded in the front of the phone that "projects and analyzes more than 30,000 invisible dots to create a precise depth map of your face". We are still a month away until the retail debut of the iPhone X, so there is no way of telling how well this will work in the real world, but it appears that Apple is confident. According to KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple will likely abandon Touch ID in all of its 2018 models in favor of Face ID.
Kuo believes that Apple's new facial recognition technology will allow the firm to have a huge competitive advantage over Android smartphone manufacturers, so much so that it could take potentially years for its competitors to catch up. While iPhones could roll out next year without Touch ID, Apple's Craig Federighi, who is the Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, may have alluded that Touch ID may not be abandoned across all of its products.
Of course, the absence of Touch ID next year is only a prediction, meaning that anything can happen during the course of the year. So for now, we will simply have to way to see what materializes in 2018.
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