iPhone 15's Face ID looks set to disappear as under-screen Samsung tech leaks

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published 24 March 2022

The iPhone 14 may be months away, but if you want to keep making the best phones you need to plan ahead – so the tech for the iPhone 15 is already being decided upon. And, according to a fresh leak, Samsung is working on a new display technology that could make the Face ID camera disappear completely.

According to the report, which comes from The Elec, Samsung Display is working on the tech for two phones: the iPhone 15 Pro and its own foldable phones. The selfie camera will get a pin hole-display, which is where there's a little hole in the screen for the camera to shoot through, and the rest of the Face ID sensors will be under the display. Ding dong, the notch is dead.

Now you see it, now you don't: Face ID in the iPhone 15

The Elec says the system works in the same way as the one in the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3: it uses a transparent cathode that's patterned in such a way that it isn't visible to the eye but that's transparent enough to let light into the sensors. So you'd still essentially have the notch, but you wouldn't be able to see it any more because the display would completely cover everything but the selfie camera lens.

Under-display Face ID has previously been predicted for next year's iPhones by Ming-Chi Kuo, the well-connected Apple analyst, but it won't make it into this year's iPhone 14 Pro or iPhone 14 Pro Max: they're expected to have a pill-shaped section for the Face ID sensors as well as a hole punch for the camera, with the standard iPhone 14 sticking with the notch for at least another year.

As ever with Apple rumours, this might not make it into the finished iPhone 15: Apple tries all kinds of things, not all of which make it into production quickly or at all. But given Apple's intention to make the notch go away in the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max, this one seems like a safe bet to me.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).