Apple is a brand, as we all know, especially known for its highly polished demonstration, which transformed traditionally dry onstage presentations into an art form. But something happened which gave rise to some speculation against Apple. According to the reports obtained during the launch event of iPhone X on Tuesday, keynote presentation outlets and critics reported that the tentpole Face ID feature failed.
After this event, the next day, Apple tried to cover it up by issuing a statement saying that the handset, particularly the biometric feature, was working as intended.
As we can clearly see in the video, Federighi picks up iPhone X and tries to unlock it with Face ID. In this feature, the user is required to look at the true depth of the camera and swipe up on the screen. When the first attempt failed, he put the device to sleep and tried it again, but unfortunately, the second attempt failed too. At this moment, the iPhone displayed a prompt saying, “your passcode is required to enable Face ID.” This alert thus gave rise to speculation of Face ID failure.
A statement by Yahoo’s David Pogue says
“Tonight, I was able to contact Apple. After examining the logs of the demo iPhone X, they now know exactly what went down. Turns out my first theory in this story was wrong—but my first UPDATE theory above was correct: “People were handling the device for stage demo ahead of time,” says a rep, “and didn’t realize Face ID was trying to authenticate their face. After failing a number of times, because they weren’t Craig, the iPhone did what it was designed to do, which was to require his passcode.” In other words, “Face ID worked as it was designed to.”
Apple specially developed this biometric system to protect against spoofing and hardware hacks. This system somewhat works the same way Touch ID used to. So, it is said the biometric system automatically gets disabled after two attempts (as stated by Apple documentation).
Thus, it’s still not known how the second device was made on stage without attempting to authenticate random Apple employees.
