From Video purports to show testing of Apple 'iPhone 8' with rear-mounted Touch ID:

A video published on Tuesday allegedly shows Apple's "iPhone 8" in quality control testing —with a rear-mounted Touch ID sensor, despite most recent rumors discounting that possibility.

If you've been watching the rumor mills this year, you'd know Apple's had this option of last resort in their back pocket for a long time. What's important to learn is how much otherwise risky innovation this sort of back-up planning enables.

And if you have been not just watching, but watching closely, you've seen a pretty interesting narrative grow around this year's iPhone rumors. I actually do believe Apple was, until the last moment, trying to embed Touch ID in the screen. I'd also buy the rumor that at least one team at Apple was sweating bricks, worried the in-screen Touch ID was going to get the cut, and were scurrying to get it to work at scale.

The reason they could wait until the last minute was precisely because they had Touch ID on the back of the phone ready to go. If the only other option they were left with was retina scanning, Apple Pay could've been in trouble. Can you imagine if iRetinaScan 1.0 had a flaw? Now what happens to Apple Pay for those who shelled out for your latest phone? Do they simply lose access to Apple Pay, now that you couldn't keep it secure? If you thought AntennaGate was a big deal, wait until Retina-Apple-Pay-Gate.

I'm not saying Apple is excited about back of the phone Touch ID (if it's really going to be used -- I suppose even if this video is legit, Apple could spin up a few mock lines without releasing that design), but it's better than nothing. Now you can include retina scan as the primary access point but not bet the farm on it working.

I've been letting an idea for a post stew for a while about how Apple has been remaking hardware to fit in previously designed shells. The original iMac is a good example, as it went through a number of iterations before the shell changed.

Starting with the latest iPod touch refresh, however, I think we hit a new gear with hardware design. And with the iPhone 7S or 8 or whatever it'll become, now we're no longer putting, say, last generation's innards into a previously released case, but ensuring that we can use either option 1 or option 2 with the next generation's shell. We saw, for example, two winners in the latest MacBook Pro. The touch bar MacBook Pro and the MacBook Pro Escape are two completely different animals, as I mentioned last December. Who knows how many other designs were created for the same basic aluminum laptop that didn't get chosen.

My budding claim is that Apple's MO is now to finish the outer shell well before a final decision has been made on what precisely is going inside. And to swap the choice on insides at the last minute is no longer a big deal, giving Apple lots more room to experiment within a generation.

These different design needs are, to steal from Rumsfeld again, known unknowns. If you know you're down to 5 either-or decisions for insides, you can build an exterior that anticipates every combination of them. If there's no back of the phone Touch ID, there's probably a tiny bit of space between the silicon and case that goes unused, or is now used by a battery with a slightly different design. If there is a back of the phone Touch ID, the changes to the rest of the hardware aren't just minimal, they're already completely anticipated.

I'm going to bet this sort of "planning for known unknowns" is exactly what Apple's doing, and doing better than anyone.

Labels: apple, design, iphone, planning