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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> The addition of the fingerprint scanner alone is a win

Interesting. Every other laptop has one these days, but I haven't really seen people using it much. It seems more like a gimmick.

Fingerprint scanner on a phone makes more sense, because it lets you to unlock it almost as quickly as if you didn't have any lockscreen security, which is a big convenience.

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Every laptop I have seen with a fingerprint scanner has used one of those cheap swipe-your-finger-across-this-slit style devices. They are slow, unreliable, and insecure.

TouchID (at least on my iPhone) is 100% more usable and I would love to have it on my laptop as well.

The phone finger print scanner is sweet. Can't live without it now. Can single handedly unlock the phone and browse HN. :-)

> It seems more like a gimmick.

Don't you use a password manager? Aren't you tired of constantly typing your master password in to unlock your keys?

Because having your password manager unencrypted (so that biometrics can "unlock" it) is a great idea.

What do you even mean by that? On iOS any app can request a TouchID authentication for upgraded privileges. Would be surprised if something similar weren't possible. 1Password on iOS uses TouchID. It's certainly not unencrypted at rest.

That's the goal - I provide my TouchID + maybe a PIN (or if for added security, combined with separate channel factor).

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