How to setup “passkeys?
How difficult is setting up passkeys and is it safer than passwords?
I couldn't figure out a good place to put this info, so I'm just putting it in this reply... I read Sign in with passkeys on iPhone - Apple Support and it was not helpful. Most of this is from memory, so I'm not using specifics, but I may add them later.
I was trying to find out how to use my iPhone to login to my Apple ID account on Mac Chrome (MacBook Pro 16" 2019) and read a bunch of things about passkey that were confusing, misleading, and missing information. Here is what I figured out (at least for my specific case):
- When I try to login to apple.com it give an option to login with a passkey
- If I choose that option, it gives me a popup with a QR code, so what to do?
- Go to my iPhone, bring up the built-in camera and focus it on the QR code
- You see an option to read it for passkey, so tap that
- Chrome asks for permission to use bluetooth on my Mac, when I allow it, it warns that it won't work until Chrome quits and relaunches
- Get asked to turn on bluetooth on both my Mac and my iPhone... so I do this
- Quit/relaunch Chrome
- Go back to apple.com and try the passkey login song and dance again... it works.
What I learned:
- Passkey on macOS requires bluetooth, which I didn't read anywhere.
- Passkey works in my case from macOS Ventura, even though it supposedly requires the latest macOS Sonoma... maybe this means I can' use passkey to login to my Mac? Who knows.
- My iPhone is on iOS 17, so I don't know if it will work at all with an older iOS.
- It was really hard to find info about this on Apple Discussions or really anywhere.
