Apple issues iPhone X WARNING over faulty camera with broken FaceID feature

APPLE's £999 iPhone X has a camera fault that's crippling the face-recognition feature on customers' devices.

In some cases, the glitch can't even be fixed, with the company recommending the flagship phone be replaced with a new one, according to 9to5Mac.

The tech giant quietly admitted the problem – which lies with the blower's rear snapper – in a leaked document informing its stores and authorised partners what to do when someone brings in a knackered handset.

Apple says the first step employees should take is to run a diagnostics test on the faulty iPhone X.

This process will determine if the FaceID issue can be resolved by repairing the phone's rear camera.

If that doesn't work, the employee is ordered to swap the entire handset with a brand-spanking new device.

There's no mention of a charge for the repairs process, so we've reached out to Apple for confirmation (we'll update this article with its response).

But the bug has people baffled – mainly because the commonly-held notion was that Apple's FaceID tech is built around the iPhoneX's selfie snapper at the front.

That 7-megapixel camera is housed in the innovative notch at the top of the device, along with a bunch of other AI-powered gizmos that combine to pull off the magical feat.

They include an infrared camera, flood illuminator, a proximity sensor, an ambient light sensor, and a dot projector.

This tech works together to create a 3D map of your face (using 30,000 dots of invisible infrared light) that's then captured by the infrared camera.
Once your phone has all that info, it can use your face's defining features – like your cheekbone shape, or the distance between your eyes – to verify your identity.

But, as a Reddit user pointed out last year, when the rear camera flops so does the face-scanning selfie snapper.

This iPhone X owner said that photo-capture modes such as pano, slow-mo, and time-lapse were still working, but everything else had stopped.

And when the user tried to use FaceID, they'd see a message reading:  “Face ID is not available, try again later”.

Ultimately, the person had their iPhone X replaced at an Apple Store, with an employee explaining that the TrueDepth camera at the front and the telephoto lens at the back are linked.

"I was talking to the Genius Bar guy and he said that the cameras are connected," reads the Reddit post.

"The lenses differ on what they do. The wide angle did the ones that worked and is connected to the front facing camera. The telephoto is connected to the true depth and was not working."

Apple's document basically lies out what staffers should do if customers bring in botched iPhone X handsets, starting with repairs and resorting to replacements.