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Comment by grzm | Hacker News Reader

"I find it amusing Apple makes such a big deal of adding a fingerprint reader to a laptop, I have had that for about a decade on all my Windows machines."

I think it's more than just the the fingerprint reader though, right? The secure enclave and integration with a payment system is pretty compelling as well, isn't it?

Granted, I'm not familiar with the fingerprint readers you've been using. Are they integrated into the machine? Do they have the equivalent of these secure enclave hardware?

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The fingerprint should be stored in the TPM. The payment features have been possible for a long time although not built into Windows so you would have had to use third party software to manage that. This is what Windows Hello is supposed to unify however I cannot remember if Microsoft has actually deployed these features yet, I know they have talked about them. The hard part is getting everything to support a single way of managing secure payment. Obviously with Apple Pay this gives you that single platform however I wonder if Microsoft would fall foul of the law if they only support bio-metric payment with an MS Account?

Thanks for the details! I had forgotten about the fingerprint readers in ThinkPads (and likely others). How common were they? I think it's pretty cool that the fingerprint reader is being deployed in a pretty mainstream laptop. Edit to add: Even with all of the recent legal issues surrounding fingerprints as opposed to passwords. We can figure out what we want to secure using TouchId, perhaps even relegating TouchId to convenience rather than privacy/security.

Interesting point about limiting biometric payment through a particular account. Would it make a difference that Apple Pay serves as a gateway to existing payment services?

I think pretty much all ThinkPad models have had the option of an fpr for a while now. Dell and HP have also had TPM-based fpr in their business machines also.

I honestly don't know if how Apple Pay works is the same as how MS plans to do things. They had Microsoft Wallet before but it didn't go anywhere. I expect to see something from MS over the next year or two but as they failed so hard in mobile and clearly don't care much about trying to fix that at the moment I am not sure how much of a priority it is to them.

FWIW: Concurrent with the arrival of Surface Pro 4 last year, Microsoft released a Surface keyboard that included a fingerprint reader that could be used with Surface Pro 3 devices. This was done as a token gesture to Pro 3 users since the Pro 3 does not include the necessary IR camera for Windows Hello face recognition. The IR camera is only on the Pro 4 and Surface Book.

TLDR: It's not integrated as well as on the new Mac, as usual in the PC world.

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