This One Weird iOS9 Bug Made Me Briefly Speculate About TouchID’s Potential for My Laptop

For the life of me I cannot seem to reproduce the bug, but I swear to the deity of your choosing that this morning, my iPhone 6 (currently running iOS 9.0 build 13A344) entered Apple Pay mode while it was plugged into my rMBP.

I have no card readers on my couch, but it got me thinking about something. It would be badass if my computer had an NFC chip in it to make the online payments process more seamless, or to be able to login to my account natively with TouchID natively.[note]I can authenticate through TouchID using a third party application like MacID, but this is obviously not native to OSX.[/note]

Sure, I can already store credit card and password data on my iCloud keychain, but these are accessed through passwords I have to type in on my Mac. Granted, there are known security vulnerabilities in TouchID on iPhone 5S and iPhone 6 models[note]See here for a handy tutorial on how to spoof a fingerprint on an iPhone 6. It turns out it’s still fairly difficult.[/note] but those scanners are still pretty hard to hack. At the very least, TouchID would make for a decent 2-factor authentication token.

Anyways, this is just some late-evening rambling. If I’m able to reproduce the bug, I will be sure to post my method in an update here..

 


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