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.
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?