iPhone 5s is our most refined iPhone to date. It is meticulously designed, engineered, and crafted. But it's the remarkable innovation inside the iPhone 5s that sets a new precedent. It's not just rampant technology for technology's sake. Every single component, every process, has been considered and measured to make sure that it's truly useful, and that it actually enhances the user's experience.
This care, this consideration, extends to how we protect all of the important information that you actually carry with you on your iPhone. It's what led us to create Touch ID.
Your fingerprint is one of the best passwords in the world. It's always with you and no two are exactly alike. So it made perfect sense to create a simple, seamless way to use it as a password. With just a touch of your home button, the Touch ID sensor quickly reads your fingerprint and automatically unlocks your phone. You can even use it to authorize purchases through our stores for music, movies, TV shows, apps, and books. Setting up Touch ID to recognize your fingerprint is easy, and every time you use it it gets better at reading your print. It can read multiple fingerprints, and read them in any orientation.
The technology within Touch ID is some of the most advanced hardware and software we've put it any device. The button itself is made from sapphire crystal, one of the clearest, hardest materials available. This protects the sensor and acts as a lens to precisely focus it on your finger. The steel ring surrounding the button detects your finger and tells Touch ID to start reading your print. The sensor uses advanced capacitive touch to take, in essence, a high-resolution image of your fingerprint from the sub-epidermal layer of your skin. It then intelligently analyzes this information with a remarkable degree of detail and precision. It categorizes your print by one of three basic types: arch, loop, or whorl. It maps individual details in the ridges that are smaller than the human eye can see. It even inspects minor variations in ridge direction, caused by pores in edge structures. Touch ID uses all this to provide the most accurate match in a very high level of security.
All fingerprint information is encrypted, stored inside the secure enclave in our new A7 chip. Here, it is locked away from everything else, accessible only by the Touch ID sensor. It's never available to other software and it's never stored on Apple's servers or backed up to iCloud.
Touch ID defines the next step of how you use your iPhone, making something as important as security so effortless, so simple. We believe that technology is at its very best, at its most empowering, when it simply disappears.
