Apple’s Face ID system on the newest iPhone works pretty well. It’s fast and reliable, making it a solid replacement for Touch ID. Face ID still, however, isn’t always perfect and can be inconvenient at times.

That might finally be addressed by Apple…in 2021. Yeah, that’s very late.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has published a new report outlining Apple’s plans of potentially placing an in-display fingerprint scanner on the iPhone in 2021. Some technical hardware design issues are preventing the firm from putting in-display fingers in the current iPhones, according to Kuo.

More specifically, 9to5Mac reports that Apple is unable to put in-display fingers on the current iPhones or the upcoming 2019 iPhones because of issues surrounding power consumption, size of the sensing area, the thickness of the sensing module, and the production yield rate of the lamination process. That’s a whole lot of different problems Apple will reportedly try to address in 2020, allowing the 2021 iPhones to ship with in-display fingerprint scanners.

Apple will continue to offer Face ID along with Touch ID because the Face ID sensors are used to power other features like Animoji. The company will reportedly use a variation of Qualcomm’s ultrasonic fingerprint-under-display-system for the in-display fingerprint scanner.

It will interesting to see if the introduction of Touch ID along with Face ID results in Apple charging more for the iPhone. The current line of iPhones are already very expensive, and further hikes could make it a difficult purchase for many.

Tagged with Apple, iPhone