Absolutely. It seems undeniable that having both technologies available is better than having only one (though I'm sure someone will deny it, this being macrumors...). Unfortunately, Apple has now gone so all-in on FaceID that they almost can't add TouchID back without admitting they were wrong. Too bad.
The same way that having both flash and html5 should (in theory) be better than having just one?
We all saw how this played out. Had both been allowed to co-exist side-by-side, HTML5 would never have gotten the break it needed to take off, given how established flash was at the time. Because iOS blocked flash on their devices, content creators were faced with an ultimatum. Either continue using flash and miss out on the iOS platform (which was huge and immensely lucrative), or use HTML5 so you can target both.
Fast forward to today, flash is all but dead, HTML5 is the de-facto standard and everyone else is better off for it. And this would not have happened had Apple not put their foot down and publicly favoured one standard over the other, thus forcing the hand of everyone in the industry.
That, to me, is what many critics here are guilty of doing - choosing to fixate on obstacles as seeing only one aspect of the change rather than how one change can cause many things to change as a reaction to a new normal. To them, Apple is lazy for not finding a way to include Touch-ID (even if they have to shove it at the back of the phone), and that's that. End of story.
How myopic can people be?
Yes, maybe in the short run, having more ways of unlocking your device might seem better. Or is it? Apple is already positioning Face ID as the more secure alternative. Why would they knowingly put a less secure method of security (touch-ID) and risk users continuing to use it over the more secure Face ID out of a sense of familiarity or ignorance?
Face ID + Touch ID isn't more secure. It's actually less, for the people who are using Touch ID while disabling Face ID.
At the end of the day, I think people misinterpret FaceID. The idea isn't to spend time analyzing how it works or whether it's inferior to TouchID or not. The idea is that it blurs the perception of needing authentication at all to unlock your phone.
I think what Apple was going for was using FaceID to take care of all the security stuff behind the scenes so you don't have too. It removes having to think about authenticating to access something because faceID has already detected that it is you.
What you're left with is a phone that is as easy to access as one without a passcode. No longer do you have to go through security checks because it is all done automatically. It seems pretty seamless when it works, but we're still in V1. Meanwhile, all the criticisms that Face ID gets, I am sure Apple will address them in future iterations of the technology, such as a wider angle of scanning (to let you unlock your phone while it's on the table), to working sideways (so it works in landscape mode), to improved accuracy (as the software improves).
You can't usher in a new order without first doing away with the current one. Have people learnt nothing from Apple after having observed Apple and using their products for so long?
