The Absolutely Insane UX of Resetting your Macbook Password
TL;DR — Apple has gone to its most extreme security measures to protect our devices, tanking usability along the way. Our Apple devices are so secure that they’re secure against us, the owners.
I wasn’t planning on writing an article today. Or for a long time, for that matter. But I just spent nearly an hour resetting my password on my Macbook Air and I’m raging at how stupid of a process it is.
I’m a very liberal, big-government person (I know, that’s another topic). Yet, there comes a time in tech where companies need to let go of some of their red tape and let users be user who make their own decisions, good or bad. If I want my banking password to be “password” — that should be my terrible decision and not my bank’s responsibility to protect me from that.
Likewise with the Macbook password. I bought my new mac a few weeks ago. It’s my fourth macbook, but my first with a fingerprint sensor. It rarely leaves my house — and if it does, it’s with me the entire time for the most part. I don’t want a password on it. I don’t need one. I share my finances with the only other person living in my house. If I want to leave my laptop password-unprotected and unattended at an airport, that’s my problem — not Apple’s, right?
Today was the first time it asked me for a password and not just my fingerprint. I don’t remember setting one up at all, but the instructions were clear and the UI showed me that a password is meant to be entered. I tried all of my usual passwords, nothing worked. I was never prompted to try and reset it. I couldn’t use any of my other 4 Apple devices because, well, I don’t know? If I can airdrop a file from one device to another, why can’t I use another device of mine to get in?
So I hard restarted my computer. Then I was finally prompted to reset my password after more incorrect attempts. Going through this flow required me to enter my AppleID information at two separate points, and restart my computer again. Then, it gave me the option to not enter anything as a password when prompted to create a new password. Of course, it does this so buried in a tooltip and in size 0.0000000001 font that you’re likely to miss it. All of this to realize that my original password, was in fact, nothing. There wasn’t one, but I was prompted and led to believe there was one anyway. Good grief!
