While I usually stand clear of rumors around here, there’s a bit of news concerning the new iPhone that would be hard to ignore. If you like surprises on Keynote day, you may want to stop right here.

Steve Troughton-Smith is well known for spelunking Apple Code and over the last few days he’s found a doozy. Apple is working on the HomePod and put a firmware download for the yet-unreleased product on a public server. The software was meant for public distribution later in this year so it had a lot of code inside about the new iPhone, assuming that the new iPhones would have already been released.

The problem is that it ended up on a public Apple server. So Steve downloaded the code and started exploring and learned quite a bit about the new iPhones and the HomePod including the following.

* The new iPhone will have infra-red face unlock as a biometric verification system. This may mean TouchID goes away entirely on the high-end phone and it unlocks merely by looking at your face.
* The face unlock can work in the light or the dark.
* There was an icon showing there will be no bezel and a little black notch at the top for the camera and other sensors.
* There’s an LED matrix on top of the HomePod for display of shapes and symbols.

I’m sure now that Steve has pointed the way, even more people are digging through this code looking for nuggets. For a company as obsessed with secrecy as Apple, the leak of all this information has got to hurt. While all of the above is nice to know, I’m very interested in hearing Apple’s story about how all this fits together. We’ve all grown to trust TouchID (although it still makes me mad when it won’t unlock because I’ve washed my hands in the last 10 minutes). If they are going to replace it with face identification, it needs to be pretty impressive. The next month is going to be interesting.