md_

I'm reminded of how long it took Garmin to add touchscreens to their sports watches, and how controversial it was in the user community.

If you want to check your heart-rate while sitting at your desk, scrolling through the touchscreen on an Apple Watch is great. But if you're wearing gloves while skiing, or your hands are covered in mud and sweat during a trail run, a touchscreen is not a great option.

Garmin's modern sport line now has optional touchscreens, but all major functionality is still accessible via physical controls alone. Their lifestyle models are touchscreen-first, though, which really demonstrates the different requirements for different use-cases. I suspect the same is true in the camera world.

You needn't have responded. Pretty sure the poster you're replying to was just taking the piss.

Your answer is totally reasonable, but I admit I don't have time for that in most cases.

1. Most services are not Passkey-only--most people are using it as a password alternative (e.g. eBay) or a second-factor alternative. So losing it won't lock me out.

2. A very small number (e.g. Google) let you configure Passkey as your sole second factor. For those, I am indeed careful to do what you do and have duplicates.

I do think this is kind of bad? So the grandparent totally has a point here: services find it hard to do only Passkeys (and thus realize the security benefits).

But, as a user, it's not something I worry about a lot, to be honest.

To be clear, I don't work for Apple. :) And I'm not discounting that there are usage patterns that might lead to persistent bad experiences (like your example with Numbers).

But the implication that Keychain just kind of forgets saved Passkeys once in a while seems alarmist and probably unfounded.

Definitely this. I think the worst aspect of Passkeys is that the noble goals (public key crypto! unphisability!) seem to somewhat unavoidably wipe out one of the--in hindsight--really valuable aspects of passwords-in-a-password-manager:

That you can always just copy them out, put them in a different password manager, or write them on a post-it.

That said, I think this is a byproduct of the design space being complex (as you suggest) and not, as the author seems to feel, "thought leaders" or malice.

I use iCloud's Passkeys extensively and have never had saved Passkeys "wiped out". I am not disputing that data loss bugs can happen, but three times for one user sounds pretty weird given the maturity of the ecosystem.

The most obvious explanations seem to me to be:

a) Apple loses data (presumably not just Passkeys, but also photos, passwords, and other highly noticeable stuff) all the time, and I've been lucky for the last ten years. Hundreds of millions of Apple users just learn to live with this.

b) The author is doing something weird.

c) This is hyperbole.

I'm probably picking nits, but it's like an article raising a bunch of legitimate criticisms of the internal combustion engine mentioning that the author's car has, while sitting in the parking lot, simply exploded on three separate occasions. Like, maybe?

Beats me. I can't find anything definitive on this. Since Apple devices continue to broadcast Find My signals even when powered off (as long as they have a little bit of battery left), I assume they continue to do so in airplane mode.

It wouldn't do a lot of good if thieves could just turn off Bluetooth, right?

But that doesn't use the "find my device" netowrk. I think the parent wasn't saying, "I want an app that continually reports its location to my server so I can monitor my phone's location." Indeed, that's fairly trivial to build, but is useless if, say, your phone doesn't have internet access (like, someone turns it off or it runs out of battery).

The thing Google is announcing here is like the Apple "find my" network--it seems to allow you to use other people's devices to find your lost device simply based on a BLE ping.

That is something that is hard to build by yourself, and would benefit greatly from an industry-wide standard (more peer devices reporting locations!).

Isn't people who don't know enough about Dunning-Kruger confidently spouting off about it...sort of evidence of Dunning-Kruger?

I kid of course. Or do I?