Unable to complete Touch ID enrollment.

Question

Unable to complete Touch ID enrollment.

I have a 2018 MacBook Pro. It came originally with High Sierra. Touch ID was working fine until I upgraded to Mojave (not to Catalina because I have 32 bit apps). Touch ID immediately stopped working with the upgrade. First I tried deleting my old finger print. When I tried to add a new one, all I can get is "Unable to complete Touch ID enrollment. Please go back and try again". Trying again produces the same result.

After searching the web for solutions, I have tried all of the following:

Reset PRAM

Reset SMC

reinstalling Mojave.

xartutil --erase-all (which forces you to erase disk and start over)

Erase disk and reinstall Mojave

Erase disk and reinstall High Sierra

Built in Diagnostics reports no problems

A local authorized Apple service center has offered to try swapping out the touch ID sensor/board for a couple hundred bucks, but I have little confidence this will help. I do not think this is a hardware problem. From what I can gather on the web, the Touch ID sensor has an encrypted pairing with the logic board. My current guess is that somehow the Mojave upgrade process corrupted the pairing between the Touch ID sensor and the logic board. If my guess is right, swapping out the sensor without having the ability to re-establish the pairing will leave me right where I am.

Does anyone know if there is a procedure to re-establish the Touch ID pairing pairing with the logic board? If one buys a new logic board from Apple, does i come with a paired Touch ID sensor? Or can Apple some how re-pair these?

Any other suggestions to fix this?

Or should I just give up and pretend I never had Touch ID?

MacBook Pro 15”, macOS 10.13

Posted on Feb 17, 2020 4:12 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Sherman Gregory1 Author

Level 1

52 points

Feb 21, 2020 11:48 AM in response to Sherman Gregory1

Update: It is fixed!

I took the MacBook Pro to an Apple authorized service provider (Mac Shack in Boulder, CO. I highly recommend them). They reloaded the firmware for the T2 chip. Apparently the MacOS processes for upgrading to High Sierra, Mojave, or Catalina can corrupt the T2 firmware (they did not say that, I did). It seems that many people out there have lost their Touch ID when upgrading MacOS. They only charged me $49. In my case anyway, this worked. Hopefully others can fix their Touch ID this way.

Now I am wondering if I should risk trying to upgrade again, or just stick with High Sierra.

Reply

Answer 2

Feb 22, 2020 10:23 AM in response to dwangus

In my case reloading the T2 firmware did not require wiping the drive, but you should always be prepared for having your drive wiped. It will happen at the most inconvenient time. Because I had gone through all of the attempts to fix this that I mentioned in my original post, all I had on the drive was a fresh load of High Sierra anyway, so I would not have cared much anyway if the drive was wiped.

Reply

Answer 3

Kyouju

Level 1

11 points

Feb 19, 2020 5:31 PM in response to Sherman Gregory1

The same thing just happened to me as well, after installing Catalina. In fact, I had a fingerprint already on the system, but it simply didn't work.

After the SMC thing, the only official answer I can find is "back up everything, wipe your drive, reinstall everything," which in my long experience with Apple is their go-to answer when the simplest of fixes don't work. I refuse to spend a whole day going through a torturous process that probably won't work just because Apple can't figure out their own bugs.

If anyone found an actual fix to this, please post! Thanks!

Reply

Answer 4

dwangus

Level 1

4 points

Feb 17, 2020 4:37 PM in response to Sherman Gregory1

I'm in the same situation too (as of literally yesterday as well), except my 2018 Macbook Pro was upgraded to Catalina and the Touch ID stopped working with that too.

Reply

Answer 5

dwangus

Level 1

4 points

Feb 21, 2020 3:56 PM in response to Sherman Gregory1

Does reloading the firmware mean wiping the existing hard drive contents in the process for you? Just wondering if I should be prepared to reload all my files back on after attempting this.

Reply

Unable to complete Touch ID enrollment.

Similar questions