I missed the memo - I thought Touch ID was abandoned in favor of Face ID? Did they bring it back on the latest models? Can you use it again instead of Face ID, and is it as instant as it was on the older Apple phones?
It isn't abandoned. The side button on the iPad Air for example is a touch ID sensor. They just don't want to bring it to iPhone for some reason. Plus all other high-end phones from competing manufacturers have touch sensors under the screen now.
The rest of the industry seems to be moving towards under-screen ultrasonic fingerprint readers, which if Apple adopted, would allow them to shrink the notch by getting rid of the Face ID sensors. I think they've dug in their heels on Face ID though, so it likely won't happen (although they did reverse course on Force Touch, so anything is possible).
They likely won't end up reducing the size of the notch any further until they figure out how to either make Face ID work with just a single selfie camera (which would inevitably be less secure), or put the sensors under some sort of semi-transparent display.
Many people thought they missed an opportunity by not simply putting the fingerprint sensor under the Apple logo on the back of the iPhone, but they probably didn't like the UX of that solution.
You can get used to anything after putting up with it for long enough, but use a Galaxy S24 or Pixel 9 for a few weeks and when you come back to an iPhone you will realize just how intrusive the notch really is. Apple marketing has really convinced us that watching an entire movie on our $1200 device with a large chunk of the screen blacked out is totally normal.
The S24 still has a dot right in the middle of the upper part of the screen where the iPhone "notch" is[1]. When they play full screen video, don't they black out that part of the screen too? Or do they just leave a dot floating over part of the image? If the latter, I think I'd rather lose half a pinky width of screen real estate, I had a screen with 2 dead pixels one time and they were surprisingly annoying, I'd imagine a random camera dot in the image all the time would be just as bad.
It covers 16:9, but nothing beyond that. Most new releases are now 2x1 or 2.39x1, and they all get blocked by the notch. Try playing a widescreen YouTube video or any Netflix original and you will see this.
its about day to day usage, S23 user myself, whenever I use my friends phone I just can't stop staring at the thicc notch, anothwr reason it pop so much is because my friend uses light mode.
> The rest of the industry seems to be moving towards under-screen ultrasonic fingerprint readers, which if Apple adopted, would allow them to shrink the notch by getting rid of the Face ID sensors. I think they've dug in their heels on Face ID though, so it likely won't happen (although they did reverse course on Force Touch, so anything is possible).
Or they could have both Touch- and FaceID. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They definitely could, but it would likely cost Apple more to have two sets of sensors, not to mention take up more space in the device itself. Isn't that how they justified removing the headphone jack? And of course this is Apple we're talking about — they would probably deem having two authentication methods to be too confusing for users. They only recently decided to allow things like arbitrary home screen icon re-arrangements in iOS 18.
I missed the memo - I thought Touch ID was abandoned in favor of Face ID? Did they bring it back on the latest models? Can you use it again instead of Face ID, and is it as instant as it was on the older Apple phones?