adamdodery: Imagining iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C: Fingerprint scanner, sensors, and ports

venerdì 6 settembre 2013

Imagining iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C: Fingerprint scanner, sensors, and ports

Analyzing rumors and speculation surrounding Apple's 2013 iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C, including how the fingerprint scanner will attack the problems of mobile authentication and identity

If the rumors are true, the 2013 flagship iPhone will be a S-class update, just like the iPhone 3GS in 2009 and the iPhone 4S in 2011. That means that while the overall look and feel won't change, some special new feature will be offered to make it a more enticing upgrade than it seems on the surface. Video recording and Siri fit that bill the last two times. This time it seems like it'll be a fingerprint scanner. Could any additional new or updated sensors come along for the ride? What about speakers or connectors or other new hardware? When the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C are introduced next week, just what exactly will be introduced along with them?

iPhone 5S: As in scanner

The iPhone was born with sensors. When Steve Jobs first showed the original off on stage in 2007 he showed off an accelerometer, a proximity detector, and an ambient light detector. In 2009 the iPhone 3GS added a magnometer (digital compass), in 2010 the iPhone 4 added a gyroscope, and in 2011 the iPhone 4S added an infrared sensor. Step by step the iPhone learned more and more about its environment, but not about us.

Talk of a fingerprint scanner went into high gear in 2012 when Apple bought AuthenTec. The concept had been tried in smartphones before, both in old Windows Mobile devices and more recently in the Motorola Atrix. Results were... suboptimal. The idea, however, is provocative - there's a real problem to be solved.

Authentication on mobile sucks. Accurately entering a strong, 63-character pseudo-random passcode on any mobile keyboard would likely take longer than the thermal life of our current star. Even entering weak 4 digit passcodes is annoying enough the vast majority of normal people simply never enable it. (Notice how it's not on by default.) Likewise, geeks who know better will reduce complexity for ease of entry.

Security and convenience are constantly at war, and for most people, most of the time, convenience wins. The same is true of many more complicated computing concepts. It's why Apple made iCloud and Time Machine, so more people would backup and restore. It's why they hid the file system in iOS and transitioned to automatic document saving in OS X. It's why they're developing Siri.

Identity is also becoming more and more important. Google and Facebook will peck you to into walking death if you don't give them a real name and phone number. Financial transactions won't go through if you don't provide the right account name and password.

A fingerprint scan begins to solve these problems and in an interesting way. You can have your fingerprint read in lieu of entering a password, which provides both security and convenience. It would also prove that you're you, at least reasonably enough, without the need to have your real name projected onto some cockamamie social network.

Apple will likely have to tune the precision way down initially to prevent false negatives - which would cause everyone to turn it off - but over time the precision would improve with the technology. Apparently a ton of testing has been going on around this for the last little while at Apple. Different people have different finger sizes and hold their devices differently. It's a non-trivial thing to address, and not surprisingly, Apple wants and needs to nail the balance.

Second, Apple will likely have to constrain fingerprint authentication to device unlock at first to prove the concept. People are change adverse and we generally fear new technology. It's why car makers dribble out things like automatic parallel parking instead of just unleashing Knight Riders onto the street all at once.

The iPhone 5S will have a fingerprint scanner in the Home button. You'll touch it. It'll authenticate and authorize you to access your device. Over time, and over the course of software and hardware updates, as the technology and acceptance of it improves, it'll get tied into iCloud so it can unlock all your keychains (passwords), iTunes so it can unlock all your digital transactions, and Passbook so it can unlock all your real world transactions. It'll become your Apple ID. It'll become your wallet.