From day-one I was happy with the iPhone’s Touch ID. So I was skeptical when Apple eliminated the home button (and Touch ID) and replaced it with Face ID. But works as advertised. It works so well I forget it’s working. And I guess I don’t care that much how it works. From iMore.com:

Face ID uses multiple neural networks that are built into the dual-core A11 bionic neural engine to process the facial recognition data. It takes a mathematical model of your face and checks it against the original scan of your face that you first registered.

The information is stored on the A11 chip on your iPhone X and not sent to Apple’s servers, so your facial identity is kept private.

It uses a Require Attention feature in order to work. That means you have to be looking at your iPhone for it to scan, You can’t be asleep or looking away for it to unlock your iPhone. […] It doesn’t work with photographs. It doesn’t work while you’re asleep. It doesn’t even work with detailed silicon masks that look just like you.

I tried to think of a way to make some sort of screencast to show how well this feature works but… there’s almost nothing to show. When my phone ‘sees’ my face — and only my face — it unlocks.

I’ve got some issues with Apple TV but it works so well with my iPhone and MacBook so I put up with them. And the gizmo is worth the money just for the screensavers. They’re gorgeous. Last night I fired up the Apple Music app while I was ironing shirts. In a few seconds the first screensaver came up on the big screen. If you’ve never seen these it’s hard to understand what I’m gushing about. Fortunately someone has collected them but you won’t get the full effect on a small screen.

Apple recently updated macOS and iOS to enable syncing/storing of iMessages in iCloud. I don’t use some of Apple’s more popular apps (like Mail and Calendar) but I use iMessage constantly. Google has, what, seven messaging apps now?

Prior to this latest update, a user could have iMessage syncing problems between devices and the app was taking up a lot of storage on your device. Some people have conversations (with attachments) going back years. Moving all of this to iCloud solves that problem.

I never thought much about the archival feature of iMessage. I sort of knew my conversations were archived but rarely went back to look for something. Following this update I started playing with search in iMessage (I always thought of search as just a way to find someone with whom I had had a conversation). A search for “Land Rover” pulled up all of the conversations where that phrase had been used (left side of screenshot). On the right, the conversations with each. Any message containing the searched for word/phrase is grayed out just a bit.

Like a lot of folks, instant messaging (iMessage for me) has become my preferred method of communication. Voice-to-text works great and I occasionally just send a brief audio message. So having all of my conversations stored, sync’d and searchable will be handy.