The iPhone event is almost here, and I am not sure what Apple will tell the world when they unveil their first foldable device, expected to cost way above $2,000 and then say it doesn’t have Face ID. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in March that the phone drops Face ID because the front panel is too thin for the sensor array, and puts a Touch ID fingerprint reader in the side button instead. So the rumoured iPhone Ultra, expected to cost more than KES 300,000 in Kenya, would unlock the way a 2020 iPad Air does.
That is a miss.
Apple spent nine years telling us faces beat fingerprints
Face ID arrived on the iPhone X in September 2017, and every flagship iPhone since has carried it. Apple made the case itself at that launch:
- more secure than a fingerprint,
- works without touching anything,
- enables attention features and Apple Pay at a glance.
The last new iPhone with a fingerprint reader was the 2022 iPhone SE, a budget phone. Apple declared the iPhone X obsolete in August, which means the Ultra would launch with a biometric older than a phone Apple no longer repairs.
The engineering reason is real. Gurman’s reporting says the TrueDepth camera system needs depth the foldable’s front panel does not have; analyst Ming-Chi Kuo puts the phone at around 4.5mm unfolded, thinner than an iPhone Air. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 uses a side fingerprint button for the same reason. But Samsung never sold its customers on the security of face unlock. They even killed their cool Iris scanning. Apple did, for nine years, and Kenyan users feel it daily in M-Pesa app logins, banking apps and Apple Pay.
Make tech-ish your favourite source
Star us on Google — you'll see more tech-ish in Top Stories and AI results.
The worst part of it all is that if rumors are true, the iPhone 18 Pro expected on the same stage is said to have moved Face ID under the display.
Is it “ULTRA”?
On the Apple Watch, Ultra means the most capable model, nothing held back. A phone called Ultra that costs more than an iPhone 18 Pro Max but authenticates like old devices invites an obvious question at every till and every app login: what exactly is ultra here?
Touch ID is 2013 technology, introduced on the iPhone 5s. A KES 30,000 Android phone in Nairobi ships with a fingerprint reader today. The premium Apple is asking for should buy the premium biometric, or something newer than either.
This will be John Ternus’s first keynote as CEO; he took over from Tim Cook who’s last new category introduction, the Vision Pro, shipped only an estimated 45,000 units in the 2025 holiday quarter.
Remember, Apple is also arriving late into the foldable game; seven years after the first Galaxy Fold. And it is arriving in a year when memory shortages have pushed phone prices up across the board. A late, expensive debut in a bonkers pricing year needs zero visible compromises..
The fair counter argument is this: Touch ID works, iPads prove it, and we argued in August that the Ultra could still be worth the wait on design and software grounds. That still stands. However, the biometric choice still feels like a major drawback.
Apple streams the event on 9 September at 8pm Kenyan time.
Join the discussion