Sources: Apple is testing using facial recognition powered by a new 3D sensor to unlock OLED iPhone and make payments; source: eye scanning also being tested
Company said to plan 3-D sensor for logins, approving payments — Technology being tested as replacement for fingerprint scanner
Context & Ripple Effects
This July 2017 report is the sourcing that preceded the iPhone's biggest input change in a decade: three months later, Face ID shipped with an infrared camera stack, flood illuminator, and dot projector, confirming the 3D-sensor test had become the OLED iPhone's primary authenticator. The Bloomberg piece also flagged eye scanning as a parallel track — a detail that resurfaced five years later when Apple's mixed reality headset was reported to scan irises for logins and payments.
What makes the story worth tracking is that Apple never treated face unlock as a one-phone feature: the same sensing lineage shows up in later coverage of a rear-facing 3D sensor for AR, in-screen fingerprint work positioned to run alongside Face ID rather than replace it, and a smart doorbell using facial recognition to unlock third-party locks.
First-order effects
- Touch ID loses its slot on the flagship OLED iPhone: unlock and Apple Pay authorization move from a fingerprint reader under the glass to a depth-mapped face model requiring user gaze.
- Suppliers of capacitive fingerprint modules lose the highest-volume socket in smartphones, while the dot-projector and infrared component chain gains it.
Second-order effects
- Android vendors are pushed to field their own face-unlock systems, but without Apple's structured-light depth hardware most ship camera-only implementations that lag on security — making biometric quality a tiering signal between flagships and budget phones.
- Payment networks and app developers must support a second biometric modality alongside fingerprints, since Face ID was designed from launch to authorize payments and authenticate inside apps, not just unlock the lock screen.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple's biometric identity layer extends beyond the phone: iris scanning for headset payments and facial recognition wired into the home via doorbell-and-smart-lock integration point toward one enrolled identity authorizing actions across device categories.
- Keeping Touch ID alive in parallel — via the reported in-screen fingerprint work — suggests Apple treats multi-modal biometrics as redundancy for a world where the face alone can't always be the key, entrenching biometric authentication as default infrastructure rather than a feature.
The trend: Apple is consolidating authentication around a single biometric identity layer — face first, then iris — propagated across iPhone, headset, and home hardware.