Apple relaxed Face ID specs to speed iPhone X production, says report
Apple's reported struggles to manufacture the iPhone X have become a major story, and the latest anonymously sourced report suggests the company made concessions to get enough phones built in time for its Nov. 3 launch.
The iPhone X's new TrueDepth front-facing camera was reportedly one of the main causes for the production issues — so Apple supposedly allowed its suppliers to "reduce the accuracy" of the tech late in the game to make the manufacturing process less difficult, according to "people familiar with the situation" who spoke to Bloomberg.
The report claims the watered-down Face ID tech will still be more secure than Apple's former biometric security option, the fingerprint-focused Touch ID, but news of the concession is still surprising given Apple's typical obsession with quality and the importance of the iPhone X.
SEE ALSO:Tim Cook thinks you should stop whining about the iPhone X's $1,000 price tagThe production difficulties were partly due to Apple's insistence to put the advanced technology in the phone within the company's standard two-year iPhone development and production cycle, according to Bloomberg's sources. They claimed the company "underestimated" the difficulty of fitting the tech into the desired form factor, and one said the "aggressive schedule" was to blame for the X's delayed release.
The report claims that suppliers struggled to source the high-quality parts needed to build the tech, and production yields were alarmingly low. One laser supplier, Finisar Corp., had to be dropped entirely, leaving Apple more dependent on its other partners.
Apple then reportedly reduced the specifications Face ID needed to achieve to fast-track testing, which sped up the manufacturing process. The company and its partners were then able to overcome the worst of the production bottlenecks, as respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote in an investors note last week.
Apple declined to comment on the Bloomberg report, and our own questions to the company's reps for clarification have not been answered.
iPhone X production rates have reportedly reached about 400,000 units per week, but supplies will still likely be low in the face of massive demand, with around 50 million pre-orders expected. Kuo believes that only about 2 to 3 million devices will reach Apple's distribution channels ahead of the release on Nov. 3, while Nikkeireported that the company might only be able to ship 20 million iPhone Xs by the end of the year.
None of these rumors have stopped Apple from embracing iPhone X fever, as the company announced that Apple Stores will have supply on launch day and morphed Apple.com into an all-out promo for the new device. If you're hoping for the X on launch day, good luck. You're going to need it.
UPDATE: Oct. 25, 2017, 12:48 p.m. EDT Apple contacted us with a statement to address the question of Face ID's security in Bloomberg's report. You can read it below:
Face ID is a powerful and secure authentication system that’s incredibly easy and intuitive to use. The quality and accuracy of Face ID haven't changed. It continues to be 1 in a million probability of a random person unlocking your iPhone with Face ID.
Bloomberg’s claim that Apple has reduced the accuracy spec for Face ID is completely false and we expect Face ID to be the new gold standard for facial authentication.
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