“As of early fall, it was clearer than ever that production problems meant Apple Inc. wouldn’t have enough iPhone Xs in time for the holidays,” Alex Webb and Sam Kim report for Bloomberg. “The challenge was how to make the sophisticated phone—with advanced features such as facial recognition—in large enough numbers. As Wall Street analysts and fan blogs watched for signs that the company would stumble, Apple came up with a solution: It quietly told suppliers they could reduce the accuracy of the face-recognition technology to make it easier to manufacture, according to people familiar with the situation.”
“With the iPhone X set to debut on Nov. 3, we’re about to find out whether the move has paid off,” Webb and Kim report. “Some analysts say there may still be too few iPhone Xs to meet initial demand. Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities predicts Apple will have two to three million handsets available on launch day and 25 million to 30 million units for the holiday quarter, down from his previous forecast of 40 million.”
“Apple is famously demanding, leaning on suppliers and contract manufacturers to help it make technological leaps and retain a competitive edge. While a less accurate Face ID will still be far better than the existing Touch ID, the company’s decision to downgrade the technology for this model shows how hard it’s becoming to create cutting-edge features that consumers are hungry to try,” Webb and Kim report. “Despite demanding the near impossible, Apple didn’t add extra time to get it right — giving suppliers the typical two-year lead time. The tight schedule underestimated the complexity of making and assembling exceedingly fragile components, said one of the people familiar with the production process. That left suppliers short on time to prepare their factories and explains why the iPhone X is being released a full six weeks later than the iPhone 8, said this person, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss an internal matter. ‘It’s an aggressive design,’ the person said, ‘and it’s a very aggressive schedule.'”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Four points:
1. Face ID is still far more accurate than Touch ID.
2. Face ID’s accuracy obviously has headroom to improve in future generations.
3. The delays and production difficulties are because Apple pushes the envelope. 3D facial recognition is difficult and the components Apple requires are new. The iMacs in 2012 missed Christmas that year because friction stir welding was new to the fabricators. AirPods, Apple Pencils, etc. – all new products. So, Cook & Co. cannot be blamed for wanting to push technology forward. It’s very difficult (read: pretty much impossible) to get cutting-edge technology in established technology volume. This is the reason for Apple’s horrible supple-demand imbalances at new product launches. If we want Apple to push the envelope, we have to bear waiting, sometimes for protracted periods of time, for new products to ship in quantities that begin to satisfy demand.
4. The Mother of All iPhone Preorders looms forebodingly.
SEE ALSO:
Apple CEO Tim Cook: The ‘operations genius’ who never has enough products to sell at launch – October 23, 2017
Yup. I’d wait on this puppy.
MDN’s tone is very uneven lately.. like an abused partner who’s not quite ready to admit their situation and still blaming himself, with occasional moments of clarity.
Apple made their bones by UNDER promising and OVER delivering. They had no problem bringing iPhone to market without MMS (a feature my grandmother’s phone had at the time). They had no problem NOT SHIPPING (or delaying) a particular model/color of one generation because QA showed that it didn’t hold its look well under use.
Claiming you’ve solved facial recognition as authenticator at such-and-such accuracy, then later admitting that for the same price, you’re actually going to ship something that doesn’t meet the spec is akin to bait-and-switch or vaporware.
I’m against it.
Your claim that, “……solved facial recognition as authenticator at such-and-such accuracy, then later admitting that for the same price, you’re actually going to ship something that doesn’t meet the spec is akin to bait-and-switch or vapourware”, is 100% INACCURATE.
Apple IS NOT shipping something at a lower accuracy than was stated at the keynote. There is NO bait and switch. The accuracy is 1 false detection in 1 million different tries.
A little knowledge can be so dangerous in the hands of the ignorant. This becomes more and more true when amateurs try to talk technology.
As Batman once said, wearing a hockey mask and hockey pants with a cape borrowed from a Dracula costume does not make you fit to fight crime in Gotham. Similarly, if you don’t know what you are talking about in tech, you are going to get yourself in trouble.
Easy. They reduced the necessary accuracy before the Keynote. Everything said in the keynote was true, only it could have been a higher spec if the tech was easier to produce.
Hold on there.
1. If they’ve reduced accuracy but exceeded the spec on the previous technology (while providing additional new advantages like instant unlocking and augmented reality) that’s a win.
2. The delay in fine by me (as a shareholder, not as a customer!) because the X is specifically designed as a “experimental” product to offer cutting edge features that would otherwise be unavailable due to Apple’s staggeringly huge production volumes. If the X is going to start shipping in almost-staggeringly-huge volumes, okey, we’re going to see some delays. But this is not their primary product line.
You seem to be taking the legitimacy of this rumor as fact. I don’t. The rumors have been all over the place with this phone. The only thing we knew for sure is that there would be some delay. Aside from that, most rumors have not panned out as being true. The same sources were claiming that Apple was going with an under the screen scanner up until the last minute, then called it off and went with Face ID. Yet, in reality, we know that it takes 2 years to line all of this up and the hardware decision for this phone was locked 2 years ago.
Further, even in the worst case scenario that such a rumor is true. What is the margin of difference? Is it going from 99.9999% accuracy to 99.999% accuracy, etc.??
unfortunately trump is winning by calling out most if not all news organizations as fake news, which is particularly pervasive in tech news sites.
this sort of truth manipulation is slowly destroying the virtues of american democracy
Cook does it again, lowering standards so they can ship the product. It’s his common MO. Jobs would never allow this to happen.
So glad Cook wasn’t head of NASA’s space program. If he was, all our astronauts would be dead by now.
How many holes do you want me to cover in your analysis. I would say it has always been the case to aim high and then get as close to that aim as is feasibly possible within the time limits thats been true at Apple even under SJ as it is elsewhere when those companies bother to aim high at all of course. Indeed it certainly was not common for products under SJ to start with rather lower ‘peaks’ than the iPhone X is aiming for, difference is that the opposition have raised their game, they have worked out where the money is copied ideas and Apple has little choice but to push the envelop further than it has previously to stay out in front. It is not about lowering standards it doesn’t work that way. If you were not flexible about what you can achieve no product would ever leave the factory gates on time and be obsolete before it did.
As for NASA do you really want to go down that road? They were notorious for cutting corners and taking risks because of the time limits put on them, lack of agreement, pure incompetence, over promising and continuous problems with the budgets just some of the accusations proven over the years. Thats why they have been relegated in the space programme and competition encouraged. Had Cook been running them, it certainly would not have been worse and very likely much, much better considering how low their bar has traditionally been over the years.
No need to diss NASA, spyintheskyuk. You appear to have a very limited understanding of the organization. If you take any decades-long program dealing with highly complex technology and challenging physics and cherry pick the failures, then it is easy to make them look worse than they are in actuality. NASA has the added challenge of answering to both the Administration and Congress, who have a tendency to demand the impossible after repeatedly cutting the budget. In addition, the budget is issued one year at a time (or *not* issued, in which case operations occur under a continuing resolution). How can you effectively plan for the long term when the budget changes annually and your goals and objectives change every 2 to 4 years? NASA isn’t perfect, but it does not deserve to be dissed by you.
You are making a snap judgment based on no data at all – so you come across as a Cook hater and mindless pessimist.
This isn’t the first time that Apple’s objectives for accuracy and precision have caused problems for suppliers and assemblers. Foxconn carries a lot of scars arising from generations of iPhone experience.
With respect to the current issue, we do not understand Apple’s original specifications for the facial recognition camera assembly. Knowing Apple, it was extremely aggressive to the extent of being near the edge of practicality.
So Apple reportedly “… told suppliers they could reduce the accuracy of the face-recognition technology to make it easier to manufacture.” Reduce by what degree? Relative to what starting point? And what are the real world implications of the change in face ID sensor specs? We don’t know. This could be a subtle change that will have little or no practical effect on the operation of face ID on the iPhone X.
Meanwhile, who is criticizing all of the other tech companies out there for their truly sub-standard technologies. Samsung, as you might recall, released devices with a face recognition technology that could be defeated with a photograph of the user. Some security! Yet the public outcry is so faint as to be indiscernible.
If you are truly concerned, then put off purchasing the iPhone X for a while. Wait until the production specifications are released. Wait and let the first adopter guinea pigs find the bugs so Apple can fix them. Or buy an iPhone 8/8 plus. Or buy an Android phone and mindlessly bitch about it.
Schiller presented it as accurate to 1 in 1 million faces. Apple breaks even if the production goal was accuracy at 1 in 5,000,000 and they’ve had to reduce to 1 in 1 million.
They win if the “reduced” accuracy is still 1 in 2,000,000. They can tout twice the accuracy for the same price.
But if their goal was the stated in 1 in 1 million and shipped accuracy is 1 in 500,000 then that’s bad pool.
Just keep making excuses. A promise made is a debt unpaid.
You just don’t understand.
You have never operated in a complex environment where alternatives are already planned in advance so you know you have a better chance of having the tools to “Finish the Mission.”
Cook and crew are doing it right in pushing the state of the art and having a fall-back position.
Promising one thing then delivering another is not how Apple should be behaving.
Let me try to explain this to you….
Lower accuracy does not mean faulty. It merely means that two faces that look 95% alike will unlock phone instead of having to look 99% alike. With this lower accuracy you still need a million faces to try it before it unlocks to someone other than the owner.
People confuse this “lower accuracy” with being “completely faulty”, as if some modules will always unlock for anyone. I.e. near zero % accuracy.
What this means:
All it means is Apple probably wanted 1 in 10 million to be a false unlock. Apple is instead settling with 1 in 1 million as a false unlock.
What it doesn’t mean:
It doesn’t mean that Apple will ship some devices that don’t work.
All devices will work with 1 in 1 million accuracy. Which is what they presented at the keynote.
Apple should have told the truth when they new they couldn’t deliver.
Its not accurate to start with, just watch the iphone x presentation last month.
Boy, are you ill-informed and clueless. The system worked fine – it was simply waiting for an authorization code because the number of attempts had exceeded the limit.
Better to not post drivel and appear stupid than to post ridiculous statements and ensure that everyone knows you are stupid.
Melvin, your projection is getting tedious. How about you utilize your talents for bloviating and pontificating and write something on your blog? Your fount of wisdom, objectivity and utter reasonableness is wasted watering the arid wasteland of the MDN comment sections alone 😉
This is poor.
If it was acceptable level, they would’ve designed it to the lower spec in the first place; this is Apple after all.
Next year’s model will be fixed, obviously.
This is likely to receive bad press, which will either impact sales or have security log-in failures (which is why they didn’t use lower standard in the first place) which will again generate bad press.
Another one who simply doesn’t understand tech.
There would be no security log in failures. Only 1 in 1 million bad Log in successes.
Again…..
Lower accuracy does not mean faulty. It merely means that two faces that look 95% alike will unlock phone instead of having to look 99% alike. With this lower accuracy you still need a million faces to try it before it unlocks to someone other than the owner.
People confuse this “lower accuracy” with being “completely faulty”, as if some modules will always unlock for anyone. I.e. near zero % accuracy.
What this means:
All it means is Apple probably wanted 1 in 10 million to be a false unlock. Apple is instead settling with 1 in 1 million as a false unlock.
What it doesn’t mean:
It doesn’t mean that Apple will ship some devices that don’t work.
All devices will work with 1 in 1 million accuracy.
Anything is acceptable if you keep lowering the bar for excellence.
Remember when they delayed the white iPhone six months because it simply wasn’t ready?
This.
How can MDN recommend a non-sourced Bloomberg piece? Consider the timing and note that one of the authors covers Samsung for Boomberg from South Korea. I share Jack Purcher’s skepticism: “The Bloomberg report comparing Microsoft’s Kinect with Apple’s new TrueDepth camera is off the wall stupid.”
MDN readers deserve better than this cursory recommendation of a sleazy (IMO) hit piece.
++
And here’s Apple’s comment:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-says-claim-reduced-accuracy-161506350.html
How can these reports be trusted? It would be easy enough for Bloomberg to fabricate this story. I’m not saying they did, but why put any real stock in it? Because iPhone X isn’t in any consumer’s hands, there hasn’t been any incident showing Face ID not being accurate enough, why put such a story into circulation. To me, it seems as though Bloomberg is deliberately trying to hinder iPhone X sales based on some rumor or speculation. These people really have a bone to pick with Apple for reasons I don’t quite understand. I’d sure like to know the specifics of how much accuracy is required. So, 36,000 points aren’t enough in terms of accurate facial recognition?
Ask yourself this question. Which story is bound to get more clicks? The one that indicates that they are not going to miss their production numbers by much at all, or the one that indicates oh, they’ll hit their numbers but they gimped the product so, yeah, I was right all along! Just for a different reason!
In a statement, Apple has directly refuted claims that Face ID has been compromised by changes in how it certifies parts for the Face ID system.
“Customer excitement for iPhone X and Face ID has been incredible, and we can’t wait for customers to get their hands on it starting Friday, November 3. Face ID is a powerful and secure authentication system that’s incredibly easy and intuitive to use. The quality and accuracy of Face ID haven’t changed. It continues to be 1 in a million probability of a random person unlocking your iPhone with Face ID.
Bloomberg’s claim that Apple has reduced the accuracy spec for Face ID is completely false and we expect Face ID to be the new gold standard for facial authentication.”
In a statement, Apple has directly refuted claims that Face ID has been compromised by changes in how it certifies parts for the Face ID system.
“ustomer excitement for iPhone X and Face ID has been incredible, and we can’t wait for customers to get their hands on it starting Friday, November 3. Face ID is a powerful and secure authentication system that’s incredibly easy and intuitive to use. The quality and accuracy of Face ID haven’t changed. It continues to be 1 in a million probability of a random person unlocking your iPhone with Face ID.
Bloomberg’s claim that Apple has reduced the accuracy spec for Face ID is completely false and we expect Face ID to be the new gold standard for facial authentication.”
Sorry for the double post. WordPress at its best.
Tim Cook lowering standards and expectations daily.
Here’s first time ever Apple raises its voice to clear the negativity. Apple says claim that it reduced accuracy of Face ID to meet demand is ‘completely false’.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-says-claim-reduced-accuracy-161506350.html
Check out the analysis of this story by John Gruber over at daring fireball.com. He’s pretty well connected, and blows the story apart.
A DBT mode: fake news!
What would would Androidians not do to sell more Samsung-style unsmartphones?