Last week we reported on Apple’s latest event and the myriad of rather exciting features that are set to accompany its release. How does Apple Face ID work?

One of these is the brand new Face ID, which allows ordinary folk, like us, to simply look at their phone to be logged in automatically. No more fumbling around with gloves, or dealing with mucky fingers – instead the new process should be clean, secure and slick.

However, there has been some concern over the safety and security of this somewhat radical feature. Customers from across London and around the UK have come to us with queries: can we really trust a facial scanner? Surely it’s pretty easy to fool a piece of technology? And, most importantly, what on earth do Apple intend on doing with our scans? Concerns have amped up since it was revealed that Samsung’s rival Face Unlock isn’t quite as secure as we would have hoped and more than that it’s not desperately effective.

However, panic not – we at Mac Rental Company have got some research together to find out what’s really going on with Apple’s Face ID.

Well, firstly and possibly obvious, Apple’s software is far far better than anyone else. Generally, other companies are simply using the current selfie camera on your phone, which can only take a flat photo of your face. However, over at Apple they have created a brand spanking new piece of technology called the TrueDepth Sensor which manages to fit a huge amount of hardware into a pretty small space. This means the technology of the forward facing camera is combined with a new infrared camera, dot projector and flood illuminator. For those of you aren’t fluent in geek that means the camera can see in 3D – which none of the other cameras are able to do. In fact, the camera is pretty cool – using the phone to light up your face, it fires out 30,000 infrared dots (invisible to the human eye, don’t panic) that work to highlight your features and create a rough pattern, takes pictures of those dots with the infrared camera and then decides if that person looks like you.

According to Apple the chance of fooling Face ID is close to 1 in a million, which is particularly impressive given that the chance of fooling the fingerprint scanner was 1 in 50,000.

Not only that, but Apple has assured users they will store your face on an encrypted part of your phone, rather than on the cloud. It will also run every facial scan through the Secure Enclave, an independent co-processor with its own encrypted memory, secure boot process and random number generator.

We would love to hear from you. Feel free to drop the Mac Rental Company team a line on sales@macrentalcompany.co.uk or give us a call on 0207 293 0447 if you would like to discuss the hire of any MacBook Pros, Macbook Pro Retina, iMacs and iMac Retinas. We offer a fantastic delivery service with same day one-hour delivery in London and same day delivery in the UK, delivered to your door at a time that works for you. We also have in-house engineers who are able to repair any Apple products that very same day.