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Comment by stblack | Hacker News Reader

Except... is it just me, or is TouchID on MacOS unreliable for mostly everyone? It seems like I have a 25% success rate with TouchID. I have the same fingerprint mapped to three "fingers" and still it's awful.

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I've noticed people saying this over on MacRumors, but my experience is exactly the opposite. I have a single finger set up as a single fingerprint, on a M1 Air, and it's been 100 % since I got the machine 20 months ago.

Like literally 100 %, I don't think I've ever had to touch the sensor twice or wait more than half a second.

PS: My hands don't sweat much and I keep the keyboard clean and without dust.

I don't have that success rate. But what usually helps is enrolling a fingerprint twice a year. I guess it has to do with having dryer hands in the winter. So I typically redo a fingerprint near the end of autumn and at the end of spring and I am fine, so I am also near a 100% recognition rate.

I also only enroll one fingerprint, because I use a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID when I have the MacBook docked, the Touch ID sensor is always in the same position relative to my hands.

Regardless, I still hope we'll have Face ID on Macs one day.

It is solid for me on my m2 air. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it ask for me to retry.

My work profile is one finger, personal profile a different, both work great.

My wife does a lot of garden work. When she set up TouchID in the winter, it worked fine – until the gardening season started. Then it gradually became more unreliable, until it stopped working altogether. Then early last fall, when she went to the police station for a new ID card, their fingerprint reader was unable to read a fingerprint from any finger. She was told that this is not uncommon for people who do garden work, rock climbing, or some other kinds of manual labour. Their fingerprints just wear down enough for the reader not to be able to read them. – But not completely. Burglars beware. ;-)

I was painting a lot of windows and between paint, sandpaper and various minor injuries, Touch ID didn’t work reliably.

I set my nose as a finger and I t worked.

Mine works nearly perfect. But an ex-colleague of mine couldn't use any interface with fingerprint recognition. Not the laptop, nor the phone, nor the (presumaby fancier) door access systems. There must be something odd about his prints, but it isn't visible to the naked eye.

It's not just you. I give up and enter the password a majority of the time.

I have noticed if I remove my fingerprint then add it back, it's more accurate for a short time. Then over time it goes back to not working as well.

Weird. For me, it has been working flawslessly since I got my iPhone 6s, and now two macbook pros down the line, I've had it fail maybe 5 times in total?

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