The Iphone X officially goes on preorder Friday, with fans researching the best possible deals and hunting for upgrades in their plans. But as this is going on, rumors are beginning to unfold that Apple had to step the iPhone X back a bit in order to have any iPhones at all.

The iPhone X has been dogged repeatedly by delay and shortage rumors, moreso than usual for an iPhone. Now, it turns out, there may be a bit more to the story, and the iPhone X was supposed to be much more ambitious than even the ambitious Face scanning technology we saw.

Face ID, the splashiest feature from the iPhone X, works by scanning your face and forming a “dot map” of it. Essentially, it lays out a set of points, thousands of them, on your face with a laser, memorizes the map, and then uses it to, uh, make emoji talk. It’s a technology in search of a problem to solve, but it also caused problems behind the scenes and forced Apple to lower its standards just to get the right parts in place:

This reduction in accuracy appears to have taken place around the time of the iPhone X unveiling last month, but Bloomberg only says “early fall.” Apple announced the Face ID feature for the iPhone X on September 12th, noting its superior accuracy to Touch ID. Apple claims Face ID’s accuracy is 1,000,000:1, compared to 50,000:1 for Touch ID. If Apple has reduced the accuracy, the company will still be able to claim that Face ID is far more accurate than Touch ID.

To be clear, nobody’s claiming Apple sold us a bill of goods when the iPhone X debuted. The phone we saw is the phone that will be in the box for the lucky few who land a preorder. Instead, Apple’s ambitions were apparently much grander, but the companies making its parts simply couldn’t meet them. And to be fair, building an invisible face-scanning laser is a tall order. Then Apple and its suppliers have to cram it into a tiny space and have it work consistently. That’s a tall order for any part, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens when Apple’s supply chain finally catches up with its ambitions.

(via The Verge)