I hate TouchID, never works when my fingers are sweaty or I'm cooking or anything like that.

FaceID is perfect.

FaceID is perfect in no sense of the term.

FaceID works better when your hands are dirty or unavailable (e.g. you're wearing gloves), TouchID works better when your face is covered or your look changed slightly[0].

FaceID has been a strict downgrade for me, there are very few situations where FaceID works and TouchID wouldn't have, the reverse is a daily occurrence. And things would be even worse if I couldn't work from home, as TouchID works just fine with a mask.

[0] in bed without my glasses FaceID works 0% of the time, even resetting the entire thing and re-registering my face with and without glasses, it works all of 2 days before it stops recognising me without glasses.

You’re holding your iPhone too close to your face when you’re in bed.

my vision is poor enough that without contacts/glasses I can't simultaneously both

  1. hold the phone far enough away from my face for faceid to work, and 
  2. focus my eyes on the screen

so if I wake up in the middle of the night, I always have to use my passcode to unlock my phone.

Same issue here. I have found a way to sort of look past the phone that reliably unlocks at night.

Sounds like an ADA violation to me.

Why not have both? This whole topic would be a non-issue if we still had Touch ID as an option.

If a device supported and was provisioned with both, and unlocked with either, you would have double the potential for biometric attacks/vulnerabilities (remember that FaceID is an order of magnitude stronger biometric).

If you support just one with the other disabled, it is wasted hardware/space in a device with extremely limited size/cost budget. If you require both, you haven't fixed the usability issues.

Now you're taking up a fair bit of front of the phone real estate (and adding some cost) for a feature that I'm guessing most people don't care about. [ADDED: As others note there are potentially other options though that don't involve putting the home button back.]

My Samsung S10e has the fingerprint reader on the power button. I have it set to recognize my left index finger and right thumb. Works great.

The touchID on my new MacBook Pro is extremely useful. Trained on right index finger.

Fingerprint readers have been living under the screen in other phones for several years now.

How about anywhere cold enough to require gloves, and reasonable enough to require face masks?

In those dire situations I would opt for passcode unlocking with smartphone gloves. Face ID, Touch ID and passcode, only the most extreme scenarios would need more.

That’s great. I’d prefer to use watch unlocking.

Also, these are not “extreme” or “dire” or even uncommon conditions - most of Northern Europe, Canada, and the north-eastern USA experience several months of such conditions every year.

Iris auth on Galaxy S8/S9 was great but it's gone.

Let me add to that several more anecdata: my parents could never get TouchID to work; it required them to re-register on a weekly basis. I don't know if it's because of their advanced age or physiology, but in winter, my fingers were also not reliable due to dryness.

FaceID has been quite good other than the masks issue. I just wish Apple would allow a grace period for rechecking auth.

There's no reason that a phone couldn't have touchid and faceid, other than the desire for every square mm of space to be a screen (any didn't they have touch ID on the back of the phone for a while too?)

Thats a very big "other than" virtually all users like and want to keep the full screen size. Their best next move would be to include underscreen fingerprint scanning and face id in the next iphone.

+1, FaceID is perfect for me and so is Watch unlock (on the Mac)

I've run into this problem with my iPhone 8 but almost never with my iPhone SE 1st gen - talking about constant regression.

Latest iPhone SE and iPad Air are both TouchID only - and wonderful.

I agree, it looks like it ticks all the boxes.

I usually only replace phones when the battery starts going. But I'm thinking of getting the SE anyway, just in case it isn't available when this one (X) finally goes.

Oh thank you. I've been making up my mind over which phone to get next. You've just helped me rule out the SE. The TouchID is one feature I've never had reliable experience with. I have sweaty hands, and it seems TouchID has trouble with fingers with sweat on them. But even when I dry my hands before attempting it it wouldn't always work. I thought FaceID would be worse until $WORK gave my team an Apple with FaceID. I got to see first hand how much better FaceID is. It's doesn't have a 100% success rate but it is much closer to 100% than TouchID in my experience. I just pick up my phone and it's unlocked almost instantly. A much better UX than I had with my previous iPhone 8 and 5s which had TouchID. I was disappointed they didn't improve it for the 8, it was just as bad as the 5s.

Mask-independent TouchID on the $399 iPhone SE has been 100% reliable. Even works in the dark, including close distances where FaceID forces you to move the phone back so it can focus. Allows the phone to be unlocked with one hand without looking, when multitasking.

One of the last reasons that I still use a 6s+ is the TouchID. I still like my headphone jack too, but the TouchID is the biggest feature I don't want to lose

I was a holdout with my 6S and it's Touch ID and headset jack. Finally upgraded to a XR last year due to general slowness of the 6S, especially with CarPlay.

I bought a aftermarket headset lightning adapter. Wireless charging largely eliminated my complaints about charging. Fast charging with an 18w brick is great as well!

I only miss Touch ID when wearing a mask. Face ID is otherwise so much more reliable and fast.

I second that SO much !!!! Everything is perfect on that phone.

I'm sorry to be pedantic but there is no way anyone would pick an iPhone 4 over a 4S, and neither of those had touchID.

> Apple reached phone perfection with the iPhone 4;

Thank you, I tell people that I liked developing on that platform and the only reason I still don't is because XCode no longer supports it and I get critized like I'm a luddite.

It's a phone, you can't do a lot more on device other than add new sensors and new networking technology... it's like buying a new car because it has a 2021 instead of a 2020, it hasn't changed that much....

Cameras, to name just one feature, have improved to a ridiculous extent since the iPhone 4.

Other things: CPU, GPU, and for the love of god, display technology.

Touch ID had to go because the home button was removed. They are now developing on screen fingerprint detection to bring back touch ID as a secondaryunlock mechanism.

The newest ipad Air has touch id in the power/lock button on the side. I know production timelines probably made it impossible to do in reaction to COVID, but can you imagine if they had put this on iphone 12 late last year? So many iphone users would have bought one just to fix face ID with masks.

I hope they do - I've been holding onto my 8+ as FaceID is annoying.

I think the sensor-on-the-back mechanism on some Android phones is better than Touch ID ever was.

The iPhone SE is physically the same shape and size as the 4 but with much better internals. To me, that is "peak iPhone".

I still use an SE to control a few things around the house. Without a SIM, with the mobile radios and bluetooth disabled but wifi enabled, and with Apple's idiotic News app that nobody wants disabled, the battery lasts for 20 days. Peak iPhone.

The original SE (not the 2020 SE) is the same form factor as the iPhone 5 and 5S, not the 4 or 4S

Whoops, you are right. I forgot there was a size difference between the 4 and 5. I had decided to think of them all collectively as the sharp-edged iPhones.

Isn’t the 2016 SE still useful as a phone?

Probably, I just happen to have owned the 16GB model that is now impractical for me, since iOS itself takes half of it. Replaced it for my daily carrying, but kept it around since it's so nice.

Yeah, 16GB goes fast. I’ve heard from a few others how much they like the older SE.

Yes, it's my phone since 2017 and I happy with that. I will use it until EoL.