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Apple Explains Face ID On-stage Failure (bbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the okay-then dept.

Apple has explained why its new facial recognition feature failed to unlock a handset at an on-stage demo (see around the 1:35:58 mark here) at the iPhone X's launch on Tuesday. From a report: The company blamed the Face ID glitch on a lockout mechanism triggered by staff members moving the device ahead of its unveil. Apple's software chief dealt with the hiccup by moving on to a back-up device, which worked as intended. But the hitch was widely reported. "People were handling the device for [the] stage demo ahead of time and didn't realise Face ID was trying to authenticate their face," an unnamed company representative is quoted as saying by Yahoo's David Pogue. "After failing a number of times, because they weren't Craig [Federighi], the iPhone did what it was designed to do, which was to require his passcode."

3 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Pass by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Could be just me, but I never had requirement for the phone to be police-proof. Family-proof - yes, but never had bad experience with police, neither did I consider it as a serious factor when comparing devices.

  2. Re:Pass by HumanWiki · · Score: 1, Interesting

    A device the police can unlock by just showing it to you? pass.

    Face unlock isn't new, not even to Apple.

    People used to show a picture of someone to the 1st gen of this tech and it unlocked easily.

    I actually watched someone unlock an iDevice with another iDevice by showing it their employee roster picture from our company website..

    (you can turn Facial unlock off.. just like with the ubiquitous thumbprint unlock)

  3. Accurate demo. by deep44 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Accurate demo of just how frustrating it will be to use this stupid feature.

    They obviously started with the idea of removing the home button, and worked backwards from there. Let's see: no home button means no fingerprint scanning ... couldn't go back to passcode-only because they already told everyone how bad that is ... iris scanning didn't pan out for whatever reason ... so ... facial recognition it is. Oh yeah, and swipe up to go home, because it hadn't dawned on anyone to try that before and turns out it's the best approach.