Ask Paul: April 3 ⭐️

Happy Friday! Let's kick off the weekend a bit early with some great reader questions regarding angst around Apple's 50th, Windows 11 passkeys, trillion-dollar mistakes, switching online accounts, and more.

Also, semi-randomly, I've been sending photos of dangling wires in Mexico City to Stephen Rose for the past few weeks, so I've included a few here.

? Getting past Apple's 50th
christianwilson asks:

Have you read, are reading, or plan to read David Pogue’s Apple: The First 50 Years book? I’m not through it all yet but already found some details I did not know.

No, but I will, begrudgingly, as David Pogue is a horrible human being. Every time I see this guy, I cringe. He's been on an interview tour in recent months, and he did a bit on CBS This Morning (or whatever, who cares) in which he repeated two lies to Tim Cook's face that went unchallenged because they were so pro-Apple. Maybe unchallenged is the right word, Cook simply smiled and nodded along. It was like watching a modern day Hitler and Goebbels dancing on the grave of truth.

Long story short, David Pogue isn't just a liar, he's a monster. The less said about this individual the better.
"Microsoft is working on a bunch of useful upgrades for Teams"

What the f#$k is "a bunch"?

?️ Not the passkey you're looking for
Christian Gaeng asks:

Hi Paul, I have a question about passkeys in Windows 11. I’ve noticed a few times that the passkey doesn’t work correctly, for example, when I use my fingerprint on my laptop and my PIN code on another PC. Have you experienced this as well, and is there a solution?

I don't know what you mean, sorry.

For those unfamiliar with how the built-in passkey support in Windows 11 works, Microsoft now uses what it calls a device-bound passkey to handle the authentication of online accounts (Microsoft account or Entra ID). So when you sign in with that type of account, Windows creates a device-bound passkey–it will be the top passkey in Settings > Accounts > Passkeys–that's then used for passthrough authentication to Store, OneDrive, Edge, and whatever else. When you use Windows Hello, via PIN, fingerprint, or facial recognition, to prove your identity, it's using that passkey in the background. I first wrote about this a few years back in The Secret Lives of Passkeys (Premium). The UI has changed a little and there have been some functional additions since then, but the fundamentals are the same.

But the reason I'm not sure what to say here is that the passkey is just the mechanism that Windows uses to store the proof of your identity, so to speak. (The passkey is actually stored in the PC's TPM encrypted storage, but whatever.) Windows has had this capability for over a decade, pre-passkey. So I feel like the issue here is really Windows Hello, which can fail abruptly, as anyone who uses it can tell you. ("Try another finger" is one of my favorite Windows error messages.) And it's gotten a bit more tedious to use...