Just as the world started falling apart a few months ago, it was time to pick up a new iPhone. I’m sure we’ve all had this experience in the past few years … I don’t really care to get the latest and greatest, but my battery was starting to die before the day ends and maybe my camera could be slightly better? I guess it’s time to drop a grand on a new time killer / tracking device.

Anyway, I got the iPhone 11 Pro, not because I actually wanted the “pro” camera, but because it was about the same size as my aging iPhone 8. I just didn’t want a bigger phone and this was prior to the exciting new iPhone SE announcement. Along with a zippy processor and that battery I needed, I was also introduced to the unlock tech, Face ID.

I’m generally not a fan of the proliferation of facial recognition in our world, but, for better or worse, I tend to trust apple with security so I was willing to give it a go. Also I had no choice if I wanted an iPhone and until there is a good linux phone (never?), I’ll probably keep buying Apple.

First impression: I didn’t like needing to have my phone in front of my face to unlock it quickly. Kind of slowed me down more than I thought, as I realized that I had previously been in the habit of getting a finger on the fingerprint sensor before even bringing the phone out of my pocket. Whatever, not a huge deal–I had to wait an extra second to catch-up with the latest on hackernews.

But then everything changed with this pandemic. I’m a healthcare worker so very quickly realized just how BAD Face ID is for these times. When at work or outside the house, I’m generally in a large mask and it turns out that my phone can’t recognize me (1). I thought about training it to try to recognize me when I’m masked, but I use a variety of different ones both at work and at home. So yeah, that sucks. Everytime I try to use Apple Pay at the grocery store, the phone has me hold it to my face only to tell me that it can’t recognize me and that I need to enter my passcode. Don’t worry though, Apple has noticed and has offered to have Face ID fail faster. HA!

So I’m basically back to using my 6 digit passcode most of the time. It’s just kind of disappointing. It would be as if you had to stop using your microwave and had to go 100% back to heating food on the stove … not the end of the world, just inconvenient. This tech always seemed kind of gimmicky, but now we’re all getting a taste of just how unessessary of a move this was.

Hey Apple … any chance we could go back to the old tech that was working perfectly well?

  1. True, gloves are more common now too, but less so than masks for this respiratory virus.