Apple abandoned Touch ID in favor of Face ID when it launched the iPhone X back in 2017. Though the company re-introduced the fingerprint reader in its more affordable iPhones, the convenience of Face ID likely means that Apple does not intend to bring back Touch ID to any premium iPhone model launching in the future. Fortunately, that has not stopped one modder from undertaking the task himself and bringing the feature back to an older iPhone.
Logic board appears to belong to either an iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max; the mod brings the fingerprint back through the side button
Though the A12 Bionic is several generations old, the SoC powers a family of iPhones that do not support Touch ID. On Twitter, @lipilipsi showed that it is still possible to bring a fingerprint reader to a device that either looks to be an iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max after looking at the default wallpaper. However, the modder did not use an in-screen fingerprint solution due to obvious space constraints.
Instead, he embeds the fingerprint reader into one of the side buttons of the iPhone, which is a clever approach and is something Apple has done with the iPad mini 6 and iPad 10 too. From his video, it looks as if @lipilipsi has attached a component directly onto the A12 Bionic die, then used a ribbon cable to carefully attach the side button to recognize your fingerprint.
iPhone A12 CPU device touch id put pic.twitter.com/Da1LuWk6im
— fix Apple 🍏 (@lipilipsi) December 26, 2022
He meticulously used soldering wires to go through the logic board’s circular cutout to save as much space as possible. At the end of the small video, he shows that the iPhone actually recognizes your fingerprint. Though the text on the display is another language, using Google Lens on our smartphone, the machine learning translation shows that iOS recognizes that there is an additional sensor.
The software informs the user to keep lifting and placing the finger on the sensor to register the first fingerprint, revealing that such a mod is possible, but it will definitely void your warranty on a newer iPhone. We are curious to see if this mod will be possible on an iPhone 13 or iPhone 14. Hopefully, we get to see something like this from lipilipsi.
In case you forget, this is the same person that modded an eSIM-only iPhone 14 Pro Max to accommodate physical SIM cards, so his talent is immeasurable.
News Source: lipilipsi
