As best I can tell, it’s based mostly on the (sensibly, never actually explicitly endorsed by Apple) hysterical pre-release hype to the effect that Apple was going to unleash some sort of Totally New and Insanely Great fingerprint reader ( just check boingboing’s own thread from a few days ago if you need a refresher on the optimists) that would revolutionize things and stuff.
When a PC OEM, or a boring Android phone maker, shoves one of those little silicon-strip fingerprint readers into their hardware, nobody gives a damn because the hacker side has already done the proof of concept, years ago, and so there is no novelty, and the only people who actually care about that feature are enterprise buyers checking boxes on some cargo-cult-security feature list.
When Apple does it, they get motivated to dust off (mostly the same old) techniques, modify them slightly, and shoot down the fanboys because there are fanboys(and, if they are also opponents of biometric ID in general, because one of the almost-certain-to-be-among-the-best-selling cellular handsets in the developed world just got fingerprint reading as a standard feature, which isn’t going to help opponents of the idea very much).
As it turns out, (aside from being much better integrated aesthetically into the design) Apple’s fingerprint widget appears to be pretty much the same as everybody else’s in its capabilities, so the interest will probably die down as the release hype does.
