According to MacRumors, Apple is developing a way to use the Touch ID fingerprint sensor on your iPhone to unlock your Mac computer.
This feature's reportedly coming in the next big update of the Mac operating system, OS X.
In order to work, your Mac and iPhone would need to have Bluetooth on so they can connect to each other, and it would only work when your Mac and iPhone are within Bluetooth range.
MacRumors claims the feature would use Bluetooth LE, a low-energy version of regular Bluetooth that has a much shorter range. Bluetooth LE is normally used to connect wearables to your smartphones.
The same concept of using one device to unlock another exists today between the Apple Watch and the iPhone. When you unlock your iPhone, your Apple Watch will also unlock. It's convenient because it saves you having to unlock two devices.
This lines up nicely with an earlier rumor that Apple is planning to introduce Apple Pay support for web browsers, which would let us pay for online shopping without having to enter our banking information.
So, instead of having to type out a password to pay for shopping from our Macs with Apple Pay, all you'd need to do is unlock your iPhone with Touch ID while you're near your Mac.
We'll be learning more about Apple's next big OS X update next month at Apple's annual developer conference WWDC. Besides this rumor, we've also heard that Siri, Apple's voice-enabled assistant, will hit the Mac in the next version of OS X.
