iPhone X — The Home Button Goes, Face ID Arrives

Ten years after Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, Apple again chose to dismantle the assumptions of the product.

Two Removals

The iPhone X removed, at the same time, two of the elements that had defined every iPhone before it.

The first was the physical home button. From 2007 onward, the home button had been the iPhone's UI pole star: wherever you were, pressing it returned you to the home screen. After Touch ID in 2013, it also held the fingerprint sensor. It was the physical handle by which an iPhone announced itself as an iPhone.

The second was Touch ID itself—the fingerprint authentication that had become woven into Apple Pay, App Store purchases, and lock-screen unlocks. The accumulated friction-removal of half a decade.

Both went at once.

The Notch

In their place came a rectangular cut-out at the top of the display—what would, in due course, be called the 'notch'. Behind it, the TrueDepth camera system:

• An infrared dot projector
• An infrared camera
• An ambient light sensor
• A proximity sensor
• A front-facing camera
• The speaker and microphone

The IR projector cast roughly 30,000 invisible dots onto the user's face; the IR camera read the deformation of that pattern to recover a 3D face mesh. This was the basis of Face ID. Apple announced a one-in-a-million false-accept rate (Touch ID had been one in fifty thousand).

Bezel-less OLED

With the home button gone, the display could finally cover nearly the entire front of the device. The iPhone X was Apple's first OLED phone. Unlike LCD, OLED does not illuminate dark pixels at all; the boundary between bezel and display vanishes visually.

'Bezel-less' had been an Android marketing word in 2016–2017. Once Apple adopted it for the iPhone X, the industry's whole high-end caught up within a year or two.

Price, and What It Meant

iPhone X started at US$999. Apple, for the first time, formally set the price of a single smartphone at one thousand dollars.

Commentary divided sharply. On one side, "the peak of Apple hubris"; on the other, "the moment the high-end smartphone crossed into the same category as watches and jewellery." Neither reading was wrong.

The anxiety about the missing home button—the unease of being asked to abandon a habit ten years deep—largely disappeared within weeks of release. It turns out the swipe-up gesture is something fingers learn surprisingly quickly.