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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

I definitely consider Touch ID to be far superior to Face ID, especially is a world full of masks.

I can explicitly have my phone ready and as I am removing it from my pocket with touchid. Even with the newer faster faceid, I have remove it first and look at it. The explicitness of touchid is preferable to me too.

Touch ID requires me to remove my gloves. Everything has drawbacks.

How about adding both? These are high-end, expensive phones.

That would probably be best.

Yeah the mask thing does make me wish I had Touch ID as a backup.

I still prefer face id to Touch ID.

A compromise for me would be letting my watch unlock the phone by proximity as it can do with my Mac. The watch unlock is good enough that I don’t miss Face ID on Mac.

Pressing one home button is way easier than doing swipe gestures especially when the phone is in one hand. Muscle memory takes over and it's a joy. It's kinda like having a Blackberry side scroll wheel all over again.

Main reason im stuck on iphone 8 is the touch id. I dont even want apple to have my face biometric and that says something from guy whos wife was working for apple and could lookup anyone for any reason.

Also nit pick: you don’t “press” the button. In fact there is no physical button; there is surface that acts upon touch and tiny hammer hits the surfec from underneath, making it feel like its a button. I was in shock to discover that once i turned off my iphone 8 first time and though the button was broken because it didn’t “recoil” or made its typical behavior noise.

Understood, the Taptic Engine (haptic feedback) is a really great feature that Apple also took to their MacBook trackpad (actually, not sure which came first). They've removed one extra point of mechanical failure and gave their laptops and phones a consistent feel with minimal delay (instead of a vibrating motor). A disassembled Taptic Engine is actually a bunch of small coils of different sizes and oil filled inside. Quite the engineering masterpiece.

Just to be clear: Apple does not have your facial biometric data with FaceID. It does not leave your device and is protected by the Secure Enclave there.

There are reasons to prefer TouchID to FaceID, but that isn't actually one of them.

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