In the iPhone 18 Pro, Apple has taken one of the next steps toward its long-term vision of the iPhone as a single slab of glass: embedding the Face ID module beneath the display.
Achieving this without having the Face ID array be visible through the display and without compromising the quality of this section of the screen required some clever engineering …
Jony Ive described his long-term vision of the iPhone design as a single slab of glass, and while he is no longer with the company, that goal has remained. Eventually, Apple wants to embed all of the technology requiring screen real estate beneath the display, including both Face ID and front-facing camera.
The iPhone 18 Pro has achieved the first of these, but it was no easy task. Face ID requires infrared light to be both emitted and received by the TrueDepth module – and IR light cannot pass through display pixels.
Apple needed to create gaps between the pixels large enough to allow the IR light to pass between them, but without any visible degradation in the display. To do so, the company’s engineers set out to design a different pixel layout with larger gaps without visibly impacting what can be displayed on those pixels.
iFixit used a microscope to show this pixel pattern, with Apple confirming to me me that the overall pixel density over the module is reduced by half. This would potentially have created a second problem: half the pixel density might have created a visibly dimmer section of the display, so Apple increases the brightness of these pixels to compensate. There also appears to be an IR pass filter to block visible light from passing through the gaps, further hiding the components.
The result is remarkable. For all practical purposes, the TrueDepth camera array is impossible to see even when staring at it extremely closely. I couldn’t capture it even using macro photography with different screen colors and lighting conditions. That’s not to say it’s completely impossible to detect, as iFixit’s microscope view shows, but rather that there is absolutely no way you’ll notice it in everyday use.
Right now, that achievement reduces the size of the Dynamic Island, which in turn enables support for three live activities rather than two. In some future iPhone model, the front-facing camera will also be hidden beneath the display. That’s technically possible today, but the compromise in image quality is currently greater than Apple is willing to accept. Solving that issue is a matter of when rather than if.
You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel
