Thank you. So you mean to say that making an electron micrograph of this chip will not even reveal it's secrets? If the data persists after removal of power, some physical structure contains the data. Somewhere a hash of the fingerprint/password needs to be stored, then somewhere the function to compute that into an AES cipher needs to be stored.

I'm going on and on about this because I see no way in which this problem is not down-boil-able to brute-forcing the password the user puts in.

Actually Apple admits this much! They can build a work around! What stops the three-letter-agency from building it?

There must at some point be a complex user entered passphrase if you want to be safe. This can be a fingerprint of course but there is always the 4 letter password/passphrase that is the weak point.

I could be completely wrong, so far I'm not convinced I am.