Aw, man. According to a new report from Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, Apple is planning to bring Face ID to the iMac — but not in the upcoming redesign that’s due this year.
He says Apple’s facial recognition system had originally been planned to arrive in this year’s iMac redesign, “but it’s now unlikely to be included in the first iteration of the new design.”
There’s little doubt that Face ID will come to the Mac line; the only question is “when?” Apple has been granted patents for desktops and laptops with the facial recognition software since 2017.
That year, patent number 20170193282 for “presence sensing” described how Macs in sleep mode could use their camera to look for faces. If the desktop or laptop spotted a face, it would use facial recognition to wake the Mac if the user is identified.
In March 2020, Apple was granted a patent for a “light recognition module for determining a user of a computing device.” It’s for “a light pattern recognition module that is capable of emitting a predetermined pattern of light at the user, and subsequently detecting a pattern of light that is reflected by the user for authenticating the user.” And that’s how Face ID works on the iPhone and iPad.
