Apple's most expensive iPhone is on course to unlock with a fingerprint. Code in the fourth iOS 27 developer beta carries a localization string for an iPhone that has both Touch ID and Ultra Wideband. Every iPhone shipping today with a UWB processor uses Face ID instead. AppleInsider reported the find, which came from the code examiner who posts as pdfu, in a section of the operating system dealing with Car Key. An older line in the same listing already referenced Touch ID and named UWB explicitly, and the new one is the second option to appear there.
Apple has announced nothing, and a string in a beta is not a specification sheet. But it is the closest thing to confirmation anyone will get before the September 9 event, and it sits on top of a year of reporting that the foldable's body has no room for the TrueDepth array that Face ID needs. Face ID arrived with the iPhone X in 2017. Apple has pushed it steadily across the line since, with the iPad Air the one product that kept the fingerprint reader.
That iPad is worth holding next to this. Moving Touch ID into the sleep and wake button let the iPad Air lose its home button and fill the front with screen, and it kept a visible line between the Air and the iPad Pro, which got Face ID. The engineering was good enough that the rumors were not believed until the thing shipped. It still landed as the cheaper answer, and Apple used it to hold the Air in the middle of the range on both price and capability.
The iPhone Ultra turns that around.
By price alone the foldable will be the most expensive iPhone Apple has sold, and the authentication hardware inside it is the older of the two systems. Someone paying at the very top of the range unlocks the phone the way an iPad Air owner does. The reason is physical rather than commercial. A folding phone has to fit a display stack, a hinge and a battery into a body that shuts, and the TrueDepth module is a depth camera with space requirements of its own. Something had to come out, and Apple picked the sensor for which it had already engineered a side button replacement.
Face ID unlocks while your hands are full and clears Apple Pay without you touching anything. A side button sensor doesn't. If that is how you actually use a phone, the iPhone 18 Pro keeps Face ID and costs a great deal less. If it isn't, the trade buys a screen that folds.