Paul Thurrott on Face ID

Paul Thurrott:

In an astonishing turn of events, Apple has secretly told the press that iPhone X facial recognition will not work well. So you can pre-order an iPhone X on Friday if you want. But you may want to hold off a bit.

He thinks Apple leaked last week’s Face ID story to Bloomberg, on purpose, to set expectations low for Face ID. That’s… a theory.

As you may know, the facial scanner in the iPhone X is based on the technology that Microsoft first used, disastrously, in its Xbox Kinect sensor. This probably explains why it works so poorly: If Microsoft could never perfect this in a relatively huge device, how could Apple’s component makers ever fit the technology into “a space a few centimeters across and millimeters deep”?

Yes, how could the company that got a stripped down version of OS X running on a cell phone in 2007 ever pull this off?

★ Tuesday, 31 October 2017