It’s time to say goodbye to the Touch ID button, one of Apple’s best inventions
Apple’s Touch ID has proven successful, but when the iPhone SE moves to what most people expect to be an OLED display with Face ID, it will spell the end of this decade-old technology.
This last vestige of not only Apple’s circular fingerprint reader, but also the iPhone’s once-iconic home button, has nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. No other piece of Apple hardware, mobile or otherwise, uses it. When that redesigned iPhone SE comes (probably not, though, as part of the iPhone 16 Apple Event), the Apple home button and Touch ID will slowly fade into memory and then be buried among all that other long-forgotten classic tech.
When I posted one of our stories about the rumored changes coming to the next iPhone SE, a former colleague claimed they couldn’t do without Touch IDI assured them they would survive, but I understood the dedication.
When Apple introduced Touch ID on the iPhone 5s in 2013, I praised it in my review: “Overall, Touch ID feels easy and secure. And speaking of security, your fingerprints aren’t stored with Apple; instead, they’re encrypted locally at the hardware level. It’s a smart move, and I applaud Apple for doing this right from the start.”
Touch ID was such a big and relatively new idea that it spawned some unusual ideas and use cases. As technology reporters, we found ourselves answering questions like “Can a severed finger give access to a stolen iPhone 5s?“
The answer turns out to be no. The RF capacitor sensor technology would only work with a live finger. You might assume that in addition to verifying those little ridges, it could also pick up the blood flow or pulse under the skin.
Oh, but it gets better. Since most people didn’t have mobile fingerprint readers in their pockets, the advent of Touch ID inspired people to try using the sensor with other parts of their body. No, not those body parts (as far as I know)There was, however, a man in Japan who figured out how to register his nipple and then use it to unlock his iPhone 5s. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.
Letting go
Touch ID eventually became as common as iPhones. It wasn’t until the arrival of Apple’s iPhone X and Face ID in 2017 that we started to think about losing this effective, tangible, biometric security feature.
As is typical with Apple, changes flow through Apple’s product lines in an evolutionary manner on both iPhones and iPads (the iPod Touch died with its Touch ID-less home button intact). But, as was the case with the transition from 30-pin charging ports to Lightning and now USB-C, changes will eventually occur across all classes of Apple products.
Anyone who thought the iPhone SE would somehow escape the update and slip through the clutches of innovation like a greased banana was fooling themselves. Change is inevitable in all things, and a requirement for technology.
And yet I still feel a pang of sadness at the approaching demise of what was once a symbol of all iPhone technology. The home button, originally a small square in the center, was recognizable from a distance. Less so with Touch ID, which eventually traded motion for haptic response and the square for sparkling glass, with a later metal ring around the Touch ID circle.
Maybe we wouldn’t have fallen in love with the iPhone and this little button if Apple hadn’t done such a good job of creating it. As I wrote in 2013 , “Putting the fingerprint reader under the home button is a brilliant idea — made all the more so by the fact that the execution is nearly flawless.”
So we only have Apple to thank and blame for our devotion to this vanishing invention. Face ID is probably smarter, faster, and more secure, but we will never forget the home button and Touch ID, and we may miss them long after the next iPhone SE arrives.