In the secret laboratories of the company in Cupertino, they are working hard on the development of new technologies that will amaze the world in a few years. One of them it has to do with Mac chargers that in the future could "remember your Mac's password". In reality they don't remember passwords but they are built with a unique ID that OS X recognizes and as soon as it does this it rewrites a backup of your Mac's password. Apple claims in the patent that the technology could be used not only with chargers but also with other types of devices familiar to the user: printer, external hard disk, USB stick, etc.
In US patent filing 2012/0005747 Apple proposes a power adapter whose transformer unit has a small memory module built into it. This stores either an encrypted password (or recovery question) whose key is stored on the laptop or smartphone. This way only the correct computer or phone can access the recovery data. For added security, part of the encrypted password could reside on a network server, too.
The idea of the technology is good, but it will work very well only if your Mac is not stolen because a theft of the Mac and the device that unlocks the password would give the thief total access to your information. Unfortunately, the technology is still far from being implemented in a future Mac, but it is interesting to find out what exactly Apple is thinking.
