Safety Net Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Trending Now Mashable Selects Look Up Getting Technical with Mashable Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Say More Versus In My Bag Mashable @Home All Series The scoop comes from -- who else? -- Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Timothy Beck Werth is the Tech Editor at Mashable, where he leads coverage and assignments for the Tech and Shopping verticals. Tim has over 15 years of experience as a journalist and editor, and he has particular experience covering and testing consumer technology, smart home gadgets, and men's grooming and style products. Previously, he was the Managing Editor and then Site Director of SPY.com, a men's product review and lifestyle website. As a writer for GQ, he covered everything from bull-riding competitions to the best Legos for adults, and he's also contributed to publications such as The Daily Beast, Gear Patrol, and The Awl.

You might have a hard time trying to get hold of one yourself for the foreseeable future, but the iPhone Duo has been in the hands of reviewers for a little while now. And while it is clearly a first-generation product, overall impressions of Apple's first foldable have been broadly very positive. One potential annoyance for anyone coming from another modern iPhone, however, is the lack of Face ID, with Apple instead opting to go back to Touch ID for the first time since 2022's iPhone SE. Most iPhone users will have been using Face ID since the iPhone X. In our own review we said the Touch ID solution here works accurately, but can take a bit longer to unlock the phone than you might expect, and according to reliable Apple insider Mark Gurman, the company is already looking at how it can bring its newer technology to the iPhone Duo's inevitable follow-up.

With the release of iOS 27, Apple is deploying its much-anticipated Siri AI suite of features across its software ecosystem. One noteworthy change is coming to Apple HomeKit, as the Cupertino company injects Apple Intelligence into its home security camera system. The upgrade launches Apple's video summary feature, where you can generate descriptions of videos caught on your home security system. The feature groups together related clips across multiple cameras for a comprehensive picture of a specific event, allowing you to easily review events that occur at your home. For instance, Apple's press release announcing the feature shows a man identified as Robert arriving at a home with a fruit bowl of fruit, an example showcasing how HomeKit's Apple Intelligence and Face Recognition software work together to generate these summaries.

The biggest loss you'll feel when switching from a traditional iPhone to the Duo is the latter's lack of a FaceID array for facial recognition. If you've grown accustomed to FaceID, which pretty much always works as long as your face is somewhere in front of the screen, losing that option could be a major blow. When unlocking your phone, making purchases and logging into apps requires fiddling with a finicky fingerprint sensor every time, it can become aggravating. On the other hand, some users still miss the older iPhones with TouchID. Maybe your face doesn't play nice with FaceID for whatever reason.

The iOS 27.0.1 update began rolling out to users on Monday, and it mainly focuses on fixing bugs affecting the iPhone 18 Pro models. A number of reports from iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max owners suggested that the device would restart out of the blue after Face ID failed to authenticate. Some customers even had their devices replaced by Apple, but the problem persisted. The company later confirmed to 9to5Mac that it would release an update to address the issue. In addition to the Face ID bug, this update fixes another quirk that caused a color artifact in photos taken on the iPhone 18 Pro at the 2x zoom level.

More than half a million faces were scanned in some of the capital's busiest transport hubs during the trial. More than half a million faces were scanned in some of the capital's busiest transport hubs during the trial. Tue 29 Sep 2026 05.48 EDTLast modified on Tue 29 Sep 2026 07.53 EDT A six-month trial of live facial recognition (LFR) technology in London's railway stations that cost more than £320,000 and almost 100 hours of police officers' time led to one false match against a watchlist of suspects and no arrests. More than half a million faces were scanned between February and July this year in some of the capital's busiest transport hubs during the British Transport Police (BTP) trial of the surveillance technology, which aimed to help catch offenders and people breaching court orders. A freedom of information document obtained by Liberty Investigates and shared with the Guardian shows that equipment hire and police staffing for the 18 deployments across the trial cost £320,786 and led to only one alert on a watchlist, which turned out to be an incorrect identification, also known as a false positive.

The first update to iOS 27 squashes a bug in which the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max would freeze or restart when you try to use Face ID. Lance Whitney is a technology journalist with an IT background. He's written for TechRepublic, PCMag, Macworld, and Time, among others, He also teaches classes in AI, cybersecurity, and social media. Apple has released its first update to iOS 27. The update fixes a bug that causes the 18 Pro and Pro Max to restart.

Revolut is trialing a new facial recognition system in the UK that could be convenient but controversial, the company announced. The company says its Pay with Smile system is the UK's first in-store facial recognition system and has no processing fees for merchants. It's only being offered at select Kiss the Hippo coffee locations in London, to start with. Pay with Smile will run on Revolut Register, the company's new hospitality point-of-sale (POS) hardware system. It's a two-screen system designed to combine payments, banking and floor operations for merchants.

The proposed class action alleges Meta illegally harvested people's Facebook and Instagram photos to train its AI image-generation models and to build its unreleased "NameTag" face recognition feature. A set of parents and their children in Illinois and California filed a lawsuit last week in federal court in Chicago alleging that Meta illegally used their Facebook and Instagram photos to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition system for its smart glasses, and to train generative AI models including Emu and Muse Image . The proposed class action alleges that Meta violated Illinois and California privacy laws by extracting biometric information from people's photos without notice or consent. WIRED reported in June that code for NameTag had been secretly embedded in the Meta glasses AI companion app, which had been downloaded more than 50 million times. While the feature had not been enabled for users of the app, the analysis found that the system was designed to turn faces captured by the glasses into biometric signatures and compare them with so-called faceprints stored in a database on the user's phone.

InquiryIQ, a previously unreported prototype, tested a model from xAI, maker of Grok, to surface associates, social accounts, and other information about people identified through Clearview. In 2020, face-recognition firm Clearview AI became infamous for scraping more than 3 billion photos from the internet to turn faces into names for police and security professionals. Now the company is experimenting with trawling the web again, this time using AI to potentially help law enforcement fill in the person behind the name--who they are, who they know, where they live, and what they've left behind online. Clearview has quietly built and tested what it describes as an experimental AI "analyst assistant," WIRED has learned. Called InquiryIQ, the unreleased tool is designed to take details an investigator unearths from a Clearview search and then automatically fan out across the web--opening webpages, analyzing images, and assembling what it finds into a profile containing the possible employers, aliases, associates, and physical characteristics of a person police are investigating. InquiryIQ's interface states that supplying age, gender, and race can help the system make "smarter decisions" as it searches, according to code for the tool analyzed by WIRED.