Rumor: portable user accounts coming in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard?

I actually pretty like it(Athough I work with windows all the time, and only use mac at home.)

This would be great for iPhone (which you will always have with you). I could then take my data home with me at night and use on my Mac at home. I leave my desk for a meeting ad I take my profile with me.

Why does it have to be a thumb drive? It could be any computer with an internet connection, and a (you guessed it) .Mac account iDisk. Now that sounds like something Apple would do.

Wild conjecture here, but could this possibly be implemented in the rumored Apple iPhone smartphone?

It is possible and I do it everyday between my MacBook Pro and MacPro using unison. A unix tool that can be dowloaded with fink. I can't see how it would be too difficult for Apple to do something similar with more finesse and obviously without having to do configure text files.
regards
John.

I used to work for a Biometrics company, and we had a product that was a USB Flash drive with a solid-state fingerprint reader on one end.

(Note: this was Windows only)
The one trick was the computer had to have our login application installed first (until it was part of the OS). The user sees the login screen, inserts their flash drive, puts their thumb or finger on the scanner, and the USB drive would authenticate your fingerprints and then deliver the needed credentials to the OS.

The drive also contained 512MB or whatever so that you could copy My Documents, or internet passwords, cookies, etc... Not everything - just your On The Go stuff.

Peter, thats not really remotely similar. All that is is a very small 'headless' PC. This is talking about storing files on a memory card or USB 'key'.

This would make a lot of sense if they were to move to flash storage on their laptops in the near future. Just keep all that data off the machine.

I saw demonstration of a similar device on tv last night, when they were covering the CES 2006....

there's some info about it here:

http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/spcl_prsntn/article/0,1805,HGTV_3909_4784493_05,00.html

This was pointed out last week in comments to your portable Mac apps post. Repeating what I said then:

Regarding the whole portable home folder thing in Leopard, I don't think it's possible. Apple actually touted this years back (in 10.2 I think), but then pulled it quickly before release. There's just no way to account for different OS versions or stored local applications - all your apps would have to be in your home/applications folder to work and who does that? Even then, certain apps rely on system services that only exist on particular versions of the OS. For example, how is the latest Safari going to work on a 10.2/10.3 machine it's plugged into when the webkit it needs isn't there?