Password hint not showing up

Thanks John Galt. Yea... lots of people have encountered this issue. As it happens, yesterday I somehow fixed the issue and I'm speculating what's needed to make the hint display is to use System Settings->Users & Groups->selecting a defined user->clicking on the “i” widget and enabling “Allow user to reset password using Apple Account”.

With all the fussing around I did yesterday, this action was what seemed to kick the system to display the hint, and I now have the "?" displaying to right of the password field-box.

For the record, I'm running 15.2 (24C101) on an M4 Pro mini with 64GB memory/UM.

Also it may require to have at least two Admin user accounts and use one to reset the password for the other to get the 'hint' to display. 'Tis a very weird problem me thinks.

You totally have missed the point. The pw hint is not being display as it should, and is therefore a software bug.... and yes it's been reported to Apple via Feedback Assistance FB16176649, along with 463 other people posting this issue here. This issue seems to have surfaced after Big Sur.

On the face of it it seems the issue arose sometime after the release of 10.15.7.

It would appear so.

bxs@Mac ~ % defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow RetriesUntilHint

For what it's worth mine returns the same value. There should be a password hint after three attempts, just as there had been in the past.

It may have manifested subsequent to 10.15.7 or perhaps some other version; I no longer recall, but I can tell you the "hint" works with High Sierra, as well as El Capitan as you confirmed. I no longer retain several intervening versions I can test, specifically, no Mojave nor Catalina. I also agree it doesn't appear to correlate with Touch ID.

I haven't done anything peculiar with my Macs, so assuming you reported it I suspect it's a bug Apple has no interest in addressing. Add it to the list.

Barry Sharp wrote:

I have set for password hint for my user account but when I purposely enter its password incorrectly multiple times I do not see the password hint being displayed, and eventually I get locked out at first for 1 min, and later as I enter bad passwords for another 5 mins, and so on.

In no instances does the password hint get displayed.

? Why not enter the correct psswd and get on with it.

Write it down somewhere for safe keeping if you can not remember your password...(?)

if it is not working as expected —

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The current stable release of Sequoia including bug fixes, security updates is macOS 15.2

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Ok, stop the presses. I was able to make it work on one iMac running Big Sur where I am certain it did not work before. Complicating the matter is that there is only one User Account of the few on that iMac in which the password hint appears after three failed attempts.

The hint does not appear in the other User Accounts, including the one in which I posted my earlier reply.

Clearly this is more complicated than I had thought. Now I'm going to have to go into debug mode to get to the bottom of it. Thanks a lot.