Touch ID
Electronic fingerprint recognition feature by Apple
Touch ID is an electronic fingerprint recognition feature designed and released by Apple Inc. that allows users to unlock devices, make purchases in the various Apple digital media stores, and authenticate Apple Pay online or in apps. It can also be used to lock and unlock password-protected notes on iPhone and iPad. Touch ID was first introduced in iPhones with the iPhone 5s in 2013. In 2015, Apple introduced a faster second-generation Touch ID in the iPhone 6s; a year later in 2016, it made its laptop debut in the MacBook Pro integrated on the right side of the Touch Bar. Touch ID has also been used on iPads since the iPad Air 2 was introduced in 2014, later being phased out on the iPad Pro models for Face ID. In MacBooks, each user account can have up to three fingerprints, and a total of five fingerprints across the system. Fingerprint information is stored locally in a secure enclave on the Apple A7 and later chips, not in the cloud, a design choice intended to secure fingerprint information from users or malicious attackers.
The public source identifies “Touch ID” as electronic fingerprint recognition feature by Apple. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Touch, Electronic and fingerprint.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The first chronological checks are 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2014.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Touch ID” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.