“This afternoon, Apple rolled out the latest iterations of its tablet line: the iPad Air and the new iPad mini. Though the new iPads are smaller, lighter, and faster than the previous models, they lack the great new Touch ID fingerprint reader of the iPhone 5s,” Max Eddy reports for PC Magazine.
“One of the signature features of OS X Mavericks, Apple’s newest desktop operating system, is cloud synching for your passwords between desktop, iPad, and iPhone. If someone nabbed your iPad, they’d be able to log in to all of your saved sites and use saved credit card numbers,” Eddy reports. “Including Touch ID on the iPhone made a lot of sense. The default four-digit passcodes are easy to break, and easy to learn just by watching someone use their device. Also, Apple said that a whopping 50 percent of its users didn’t even bother with a passcode. Touch ID, which can quickly authenticate you via your fingerprint, was meant to solve those problems.”
Eddy reports, “But the iPad Air and the new iPad mini, which have access to just about everything your iPhone has thanks to iCloud and other services, is stuck with the standard passcode. And, we have to assume, a huge number of users that simply don’t bother with security… Touch ID, or its next iteration, is coming to iPad but it’s not coming today. Which is a shame, but we probably won’t have long to wait. In the meantime, be sure to lock down your iPad just as carefully as you do your iPhone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “We probably won’t have long to wait?” That depends on your definition of long, we suppose. The lack of Touch ID anywhere was today’s most glaring omission.