An interesting video from inside a Foxconn facility,publishedTuesday on leak aggregator SlashLeaks, appears to depict what may resemble an iPhone 8 with a rear-mounted Touch ID fingerprint sensor going through a quality control process.
The clip firstappearedon China’s popular micro-blogging service Weibo.
Needless to say, we couldn’t vouch for the video’s legitimacy, more so considering that the OLED iPhone is no longer expected to feature a built-in fingerprint sensor.
The short and blurry video shows a factory worker testing what looks like an Apple-branded phone with a rear-mounted Touch ID. A piece of paper next to the machine has the word “Mesa” printed on it, which is Apple’s code-name for Touch ID.
Apple is said to havetested as many as ten different iPhone prototypesthis year.
Whether or not the video you see embedded right below represents one of the abandoned iPhone prototypes with a fingerprint sensor on the backside is anyone’s guess.
For the discussion’s sake, this does not look like an iPhone 8 to me.
If anything, this is most likely an iPhone 7s/Plus prototype though I could be wrong about that. We also shouldn’t rule out this being footage from a Chinese phone clone manufacturing plant.
Most of the sources in the Apple blogosphere have agreed that Apple’s OLED iPhone would ditch Touch ID and replace it with a new 3D-sensing component for advanced facial recognition that would let you unlock the devicein a fraction of a secondjust by glancing at it.
The sophisticated sensor would use an infrared transmitter and receiver to quickly scan objects in three dimensions, allowing the handset’s rumored facial recognition feature to workfrom oblique anglesand evenin complete darkness.
