If information outlined in a recently filed Apple patent actually makes its way to a commercial product in the near future, it looks like Face ID could be featured in future Mac devices. Further, the MacBook Pro’s not very useful Touch Bar could be coming to the tech giant’s Magic Keyboard.
Apple first ditched Touch ID and a physical fingerprint sensor with the iPhone X, forcing the company to come up with a different biometric authentication solution. The resulting system was Face ID.
According to 9to5Mac, the first patent for Touch ID was also filed back in 2017 for the Mac and not the iPhone. This particular patent describes a feature that allows a Mac in sleep mode to still look at the user’s face and automatically log them into the device. In a way, this sounds like an always-on version of Microsoft’s Windows 10 ‘Windows Hello’ authentication.
This new patent application, which was first reported by Patently Apple, describes a system that would utilize Retina scanning technology rather than a 3D map of the user’s face like with Face ID in the iPhone X, iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max and iPad Pro (2019). This could be an indication that Apple plans to change how Face ID operates with future versions of the iPhone.
Further, the patent application outlines the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar being featured in a standalone keyboard. Apple also patented a similar keyboard design back in 2017. Given that the Touch bar hasn’t really evolved into a useful feature when it comes to the MacBook Pro, this is by far the least interesting tidbit of Apple’s recently filed patent.
Of course, as with all patents, there is a possibility that the technology outlined in these filings will never make its way into any of Apple’s products.
Source: Patently Apple Via: 9to5Mac
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