Touch ID Lives On In The iPhone 8

The big buzz in the mobile world this week revolves around Apple’s significant redesign of the iPhone with its iPhone X device, but amid all the commotion it’s worth remembering that Apple also launched a more conventional sequel to the iPhone 7 in the form of the iPhone 8 and the bigger iPhone 8 Plus.

Beyond its moniker’s adherence to numerical logic, it’s also a more traditional iPhone sequel in its offering of incremental improvements to technology in the iPhone 7. The iPhone 8 features a Retina HD display, a wireless charging capability, and an extremely fast six-core CPU chip in the A11 Bionic. And the iPhone 8 Plus sports a dual camera system supporting depth-of-field photography.

Both models of the iPhone 8 also notably retain the Touch ID fingerprint scanning system. Apple abandoned Touch ID for the facial recognition system of the iPhone X, but the fact is that fingerprint sensors remain a standard feature on contemporary smartphones, and it’s quite possible some users will be reluctant to part with the system. Meanwhile, various apps and partners in the financial services industry have enthusiastically embraced Touch ID for customer authentication on mobile over the last few years, and it isn’t yet clear how quickly these partners are going to be able to catch up and enable support for Face ID.

The speed and degree to which that support arrives will probably depend at least somewhat on the iPhone X’s performance in the market, and with its thousand dollar price tag, it’s not a sure thing that it will outperform the iPhone 8 when consumers are choosing their next iPhone. At the very least, it seems fair to predict that Touch ID isn’t going to disappear from the market anytime soon.