Password reset? 🤔

I’m a huge fan of Apple Passwords.

The stand-alone app, released earlier this year with iOS 18, is a great improvement over the old days, when you had to stash your passwords in iCloud Keychain. That bare-bones approach was somewhat complicated and nowhere near as easy to use as the new Passwords app.

It’s best, of course, if you’re all in on Apple. The seamless syncing across devices is one of its best features.

But as soon as you step outside the Apple garden — like if you use Google’s Chrome browser — the seamlessness starts to break down.

It does work with Chrome, of course, just not as well, and the friction of having to re-authenticate the Chrome extension is one of those silly little first-world problems that somehow amplifies itself into the kind of recurring annoyance that makes you want to smash your computer.

When Apple released Passwords as a separate app, it looked like doom for password managers like 1Password, Dashlane and NordPass.

But as our writer Rajesh Pandey explains in today’s top post, there are several very good reasons to stick with third-party password managers. Or get one, if you don’t use one already.

Plus, see the top X/tweet below. The Apple Passwords app allegedly had a huge security hole that just got fixed (make sure to update to iOS 18.2).

Also in today’s newsletter:

• The Vision Pro is such a flop that Google teamed up with Samsung to launch a rival high-end headset.

• What’s going on inside Apple? Sounds like there’s some internal turmoil. On the software side, the workload of getting iOS 18 out the door reportedly is impacting iOS 19 features. Meanwhile, in hardware, there supposedly won’t be an M4 Extreme SoC because Apple’s designers are busy working on a new AI server chip with Broadcom (which sounds very interesting).

• The beautiful Apple Watch Ultra 2 in black titanium dropped back to its lowest-ever price — just in time for some lucky devil at Christmas!

• The big gaming news of the week is the latest edition of Monument Valley, a beautiful puzzle game that I really enjoy because of its M.C. Escher-like graphics. (I own several framed Escher prints. Been a huge fan since reading Douglas Hofstadter’s mind-expanding Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.) However, we’re downplaying the news because the game’s on Netflix, not Apple Arcade!

• Today’s the day in Apple history that the company’s IPO made a bunch of staffers instant millionaires. Don’t miss what Steve Jobs had to say about it in the quote below (which only an already-rich guy would say, IMHO).

— Leander Kahney, EIC.

^{A message from the Cult of Mac Deals team}

^{A message from the Cult of Mac Deals team}

Tweets of the day

Wallpaper of the day

One more thing ...

Today’s poll

Results from yesterday’s poll: How quickly are you gonna install iOS 18.2?

Best reader comments

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