iPad With Face ID Confirmed By iOS 12 AvatarKit

Some might still find the idea either too good to be true or too ridiculous, but an iPad with no home button or Touch ID might very well be due soon. And Apple itself has provided that evidence. No, there is no leaked device but Apple did provided iOS 12 to developers and beta testers already. And in that beta form was hidden a version of AvatarKit that supports the iPad's large screen. And with AvatarKit comes the need for a TrueDepth camera, which ultimately means Face ID.

The discovery and association was made by developer Steve Troughton-Smith, whose claim to fame includes many discoveries hidden inside iOS beta code. He notes how the AvatarKit on iPad implementation currently doesn't have facial tracking. That's pretty much because the feature would require hardware that no iPad has to date.

That does imply that you'll need an iPad with a TrueDepth camera to actually make use of that AvatarKit framework. But, then, it would be a waste if you had the hardware but limited it to only that entertaining but inessential application. In other words, if you're going to have TrueDepth anyway, might as well have Face ID too.

Rumors of an iPad, specifically an iPad Pro, with Face ID has been going around for quite a while now. It partly comes from the expectation of feature parity between iPhones and iPads. It also partly comes from Apple's own hints that it would be moving towards Face ID completely in the future.

And then there are the user interface changes that support the above theory. iOS 12 for iPads look and behave even more like the iPhone X, despite not exactly confined to the same design. whether that "Modern iPad Pro" will come with a notch, though, is a different question entirely.