Excellent dissection of the “iPhone 5S will have a fingerprint reader” rumors in Fingerprints by Craig Hockenberry.
And anytime you want to access this data, you’re logging into iCloud. Wouldn’t it be great if you could skip the part where you have to type in your Apple ID?
This is a similar conclusion I came to a couple of days ago. I’ve been on the “this doesn’t make sense for apple to do” train since the rumors started. Adding this sort of gratuitous “extra tech” onto a smartphone felt more like Samsung and their plethora of extras on the Galaxy S4 and not the (in general) tight integration that Apple is known for.
But then I thought about all the times that I still need to enter my password or login on the iPhone. Websites, purchases, buying apps, logging into Google’s search app, unlocking the phone. What if that could be just replaced with “put your thumb on the home button?
Apple has:
Putting it all together, and making the iPhone your mythical “digital wallet” really does now seem like it’s one of those “of course” ideas. Thinking of it this way instead of a simple concept of “your thumb unlocks your phone” really turned me around.
Craig goes into the reasoning in far better a way than I, so I recommend you read his article as well.
Of course, there are also rumors that on launch the fingerprint reader will just be for unlocking the phone, so maybe Craig and myself will be sorely disappointed :)