iPhone X’s Face ID sensors are causing production issues that could limit supply, says report

There may be even fewer iPhone Xs to go around on November 3rd than the already limited supply that’s expected, due to additional manufacturing issues as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

According to the report, the new facial recognition sensor on the iPhone X is divided into two halves: a “Romeo” module that projects the infrared dots to map faces, and a “Juliet” module that reads the pattern. A source for the WSJ claims that there have been issues with manufacturing yields for the Romeo modules, which apparently took more time to assemble than the Juliet parts. This created a bottleneck that could further limit supply when the phone launches next month.

That is in addition to the fact that the iPhone X is already expected to be in high demand; the expectation is that the new device will be very difficult to get a hold of until 2018. And with many users skipping the iPhone 8 to wait for the iPhone X, the added supply constraints from this newest problem could mean that it’ll be even harder to get one of the new phones this year.