This isn’t a good article @ouch. It’s dull, meandering and conflates issues.

Both Apple and Google want your identity anchored to their operating systems.

That’s true regardless of passkeys and why is Microsoft excluded here?

Logging into accounts on devices you own is the ideal scenario for passkeys. When you have to handle a colleague’s computer, it gets much more inconvenient. You could plug in a hardware key, but you don’t always have access to the ports.

What sort of drivel is this? Is anyone reading the article? I doubt it. Sorry, I’m not logging into important accounts on a colleague’s computer, regardless of being unable to squat and plug in a usb-dongle. The last statement even concedes that passkeys are an improvement for 99% of the user-population. It’s an improvement for 100% of the user-population. Like usual this is just drivel generated from friction around ‘newness’. It’s different–which automatically becomes scary for some users. The writing is just not coherent and there’s zero critique on passkey’s design and technicalities, of which there are things to criticize.

Get a physical passkey and if you have more than 100 accounts you have a problem. Buy two and use one as a backup in case you lose your first. Keep it in a safe and if you forget your safe’s combination… well, I guess we should abolish safes too: terrible account recovery support there. Yikes!

Passkey’s themselves can be protected with a PIN–the software I’ve used does not limit it to numbers. It can be your ‘master password’ if you want. This is a technical complaint of mine as all software I’ve used reference it as a PIN (personal identification number), which means numbers only. Except other characters are allowed. I’m not sure what the official spec. states.