All I see here is a bunch of people apologizing for why Apple left an industry standard feature off their computers. Maybe all the techno-cool-cats and middle schoolers alike here don't have a use for it but for those of us who actually our computers in the real world, its handy as ****. I use my fingerprint reader probably 10-15 times a day with my thinkpads in the past and my current vaio. I always authenticate on the first swipe and the convenience is baffling.
Its only needless "bling" for a stupid kid who doesn't need an expensive computer in the first place. For those of who have to work on our machines and access sensitive material, I'm not exactly excited to hammer out my bank passwords or server root information when a single finger swipe accomplishes the same thing. I've also programmed one finger to open onenote and one to open outlook. Its unbelievably useful and doesn't just keep someone who's stolen your laptop out, it keeps peepers from picking up passwords.
It may be that you use your fingerprint reader everyday, but your stance on their "industry standard" usefulness is alarming. The only benefit to a fingerprint reader is for someone that can't remember passwords, which I would say demonstrates laziness in the end-user more than anything else. Unless you're James Bond or somesuch where you've got security cameras programmed to monitor your typing and record your passwords (yes, that does some ridiculous doesn't it?), there's absolutely no more use or security value in a fingerprint reader.
Any person determined enough to gain access to your computer would probably have an easier time of lifting your fingerprint from somewhere and making a replica than catching what your password is in a blur of keystrokes. Heck, if your laptop got stolen a proficient thief could even lift your fingerprint off the laptop itself and create a gummy replica good enough to fool the reader that way since most laptop readers are simple optical fingerprint readers without any kind of detection to tell if what's being scanned is a finger. Unless you're writing your passwords on your computer, which is basically the same thing, you can't get this level of insecurity with a good password.
You can't even say that time is a factor. If you authenticate many times a day with a certain password, its soon easy enough to type the password in a fraction of a second. A fingerprint swipe takes no less time than that, not to mention the time it takes for the software to place a match with your registered fingerprints.
Passwords can be changed around infinitely. Not so with fingerprints - you have at most 10 possible variations to choose from. Even if you randomly changed it so that certain fingers only worked at certain times, you'd never be able to achieve the same level of security as with passwords.
Fingerprint readers are a joke, and that's all they are. They're a novelty added to laptops as an "added security feature" designed to wow easily impressed buyers into thinking that such-and-such company is serious about data security, but they'll never match the level of security you get out of a well-chosen password kept nowhere but in your head. The only types of people who find fingerprint readers useful are those too lazy to remember or enter a simple password.
