Apple has been granted approval for a new US patent that appears to be aimed at bringing Touch ID to the MacBook. As described by Patently Apple, the patent appears to be an expansion of a previous patent approved this past summer.
Touch ID is, of course, Apple’s pioneering fingerprint sensor system, which the company has built into its newest mobile devices. It has helped to popularize fingerprint biometric sensors as an almost standard component of new, high-end smartphones, and the technology is quickly spreading down the smartphone spectrum. It has also helped to pave the way for Apple Pay and other mPayment systems, which tend to rely on biometric authentication for payments.
The MacBook, meanwhile, is Apple’s flagship laptop. Introducing fingerprint scanning to a future iteration of the device may suggest that Apple is planning to bring Apple Pay to eCommerce; or it may just be a new and more advanced layer of security for user login and authentication more generally.
It is almost certainly a bid to stay competitive, with Microsoft having recently promoted biometric security capabilities through Windows 10’s Windows Hello platform, the new Lumia smartphones, and also via the Surface Pro tablet, which is compatible with a keyboard pad that itself features built-in fingerprint authentication capabilities.
Source: Patently Apple
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