New Apple iPhone app proves just how hard it is to kill the online password
Apple Intelligence was unveiled during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, on June 10, 2024.
Source: Apple Inc.
For years, cybersecurity experts have been predicting the death of the online password as more advanced log-in features, from facial recognition to multi-factor authentication, become more common. But it seems like Apple has accepted that the password isn’t going away anytime soon. Its new Passwords app, introduced at Apple’s WWDC 2024 earlier this week, is one more solution to help protect online accounts and manage multiple logins. It doesn’t change the fact that putting all your logins in one place continues to come with risks.
“Passwords are really hard to kind of get rid of,” said Andras Cser, Forrester vice president, principal analyst.
The new Passwords app for iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro, Mac and Windows, lets users store all of their passwords, including verification codes, app passwords, Wi-Fi passwords, Passkeys and more. The offering is similar to other password managers on the market, including 1Password and LastPass.
“You can’t underestimate the power of having a default solution like this and having password security built in,” said Gadjo Sevilla, eMarketer senior analyst .”That’s probably going to entice the majority of of Apple customers to use the feature. It’s convenient. It’s there. It’s free.”
Passwords are a risky online security method
But that doesn’t change the basic concern about users relying on passwords as a default online security method.
“That’s the move: Obliterate the need for any password manager and just move to one-time passwords based on push notification-based authentication, biometrics or passkeys,” Cser said. “Moving away from passwords is probably the right message, not using free or upgraded password managers.”
Password hacking is on the rise, with IBM reporting a 71% increase in the number of attacks using valid passwords in 2023 compared to 2022. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have made moves to migrate more users to passkeys, which requires another device owned by the user to verify the login through face scans, fingerprints or other codes. This helps get rid of the biggest cybersecurity risk: people tend to have very poor password hygiene, including using the same password across accounts, which means if that password is stolen the hacker would have access to all of them.
Apple’s passkey system, Keychain, is only for products under its iOS operating system. This new Passwords app includes more systems compatibility, including Windows and different types of login verifications. The company did not say it will include any Google or Android passwords, which encompass a lot of accounts.
Password managers, like the Apple Password app, log different passwords, passcodes and logins securely under a safe account. And they do offer an added layer of protection: research from Security.org found those without password managers are three times more likely to be victims of identity theft. But whether free or paid versions of managers, none completely eliminates risk.
“They are a band-aid or wraparound,” Cser said. “Passwords are very vulnerable, and very much have run their course in protecting any kind of apps or resources and data. So then, it just puts all your eggs in one basket, regardless of who’s tool you pick, right?”
Apple did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
There are some concerns that if Apple holds all the digital keys to everyone’s password, then it could make people more vulnerable if the company is hacked. It’s not outside the realm of possibility: Apple’s iCloud was hacked back in 2014, leading to many leaks of private celebrity photos. LastPass was hacked in 2022, though customer data was not stolen.
“The one security issue ever is that anyone who gets your Apple ID and your password would get access to your iCloud Keychain or your Password app, because that is really the key authentication needed to safely access those stored passwords,” Sevilla said.
Apple, personal data, and privacy
Still, protecting large amounts of personal data is nothing new for Apple, and it has developed a relatively good track record of building its brand around privacy. It also has a hardline stance against sharing information with unauthorized third-party apps. Earlier changes starting with iOS 14.5 have asked users to opt into data sharing and blocked tracking applications, to the detriment of digital advertising companies reliant on that information for ad targeting like Facebook.
“Apple is a services company,” Sevilla said. “They have billions of credit card numbers. You can’t underestimate the amount of effort they will put into making sure that is locked down, and those are all tied into Apple IDs, Apple passwords. So I guess if you follow that example, they could probably be seen as far more secure than the standalone apps.”
Broader data sharing issues were raised at WWDC about Apple’s partnership with OpenAI, which it is using to allow Siri to access ChatGPT. Some, including Elon Musk, have raised concern that allowing OpenAI access to Apple user data could be a potential security violation. OpenAI uses user data and behavior to train its AI models.
While it may be highly unlikely, with users sharing their passwords with Apple, and Apple sharing data with OpenAI, cybersecurity experts say it presents at least the theoretical risk that OpenAI could use logins to look at personal data for its learning purposes.
Apple reiterated its commitment to data privacy at WWDC 24. Apple Intelligence, its entry into AI, will leverage cloud-based models on special servers using Apple Silicon to ensure that user data is private and secure. If a request needs to go to a cloud server, Apple says it will only send a limited selection of data in a “cryptographically” secure way.
“We’re not going to take that data and go send it to some cloud somewhere,” Apple senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy John Giannandrea said at the event. “Because we want everything to be very private, whether it’s running locally or on a cloud computing service, and that’s the way we want it so we can use your most personal data.”
Lisa Su, chair and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), during a Bloomberg Television interview in San Francisco, California, US, on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AMD CEO Lisa Su said on Tuesday that the company’s overall revenue growth would expand to about 35% per year over the next three to five years, driven by “insatiable” demand for artificial intelligence chips.
Su said that much of that would be captured by the company’s AI data center business, which it expects to grow at about 80% per year over the same time period, on track to hit tens of billions of dollars of sales by 2027.
“This is what we see as our potential given the customer traction, both with the announced customers, as well as customers that are currently working very closely with us,” Su told analysts.
Ultimately, Su said that AMD could be able to achieve “double-digit” share in the data center AI chip market over the next three to five years.
AMD shares fell 3% in extended trading.
The AI chip market is currently dominated by Nvidia, which has over 90% of the market share, according to some estimates, and which has given the company a market cap of over $4.6 trillion, versus AMD’s roughly $387 billion valuation.
AMD is holding its first financial analyst day since 2022, as the company has found itself at the center of a boom in data center spending for AI.
While companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in total on graphics processing unit (GPU) chips to build and power artificial intelligence applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, they are also looking for alternatives to increase capacity and control costs. AMD is the only other major developer of GPUs aside from Nvidia.
In October, AMD announced a partnership with OpenAI in which it would sell the AI startup billions of dollars in its Instinct AI chips over multiple years, starting with enough chips in 2026 to use 1 gigawatt of power.
As part of the deal, OpenAI could end up taking a 10% stake in the chipmaker. Su also highlighted long-term deals with Oracle and Meta on Tuesday.
AMD shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025.
OpenAI is also helping AMD set up its next-generation systems based around its Instinct MI400X AI chips, which ship next year.
AMD has said that its chips will be able to be assembled into a “rack-scale” system where 72 of its chips work together as one, which is essential for running the largest AI models.
If AMD succeeds at its rack, it will catch up with Nvidia’s AI chips, which have been offered in rack-scale systems for three product generations.
Su said that the company now sees the total market for AI data center parts and systems hitting $1 trillion per year in 2030, representing 40% annual growth per year. AMD reported $5 billion in AI chip sales in its fiscal 2024.
That’s up from the company’s previous forecast of a $500 billion market in 2028 for AI chips. But the updated AMD figure also includes central processors (CPU), an important kind of chip that sits at the heart of a computer, but isn’t a pure AI accelerator like the GPUs made by Nvidia and AMD.
AMD’s Epyc CPUs are still the company’s most important product by sales. It primarily competes with Intel and some smaller Arm-based processors in the CPU market. AMD also makes chips for game consoles, networking parts, and other devices.
On Tuesday, although AMD focused much of its focus on its growing AI business, it told shareholders that its older businesses were growing too.
“The other message that we want to leave you with today is every other part of our business is firing on all cylinders, and that’s actually a very nice place to be,” Su said.
Technology
CoreWeave CEO responds to data center delays as stock plunges. Core Scientific shares fall
CoreWeave shares sank 13% on Tuesday after CEO Mike Intrator addressed delays at a third-party data center developer that hit full-year guidance in its latest earnings report.
“Quite frankly, every single part of this quarter went exactly as we planned, except for one delay at a singular data center,” Intrator told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday.
He then clarified that a “singular data center provider” is more accurate.
“Some people might think it’s one complex, but when I go over the numbers, we’re talking about multiple places,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer said. “And it just so happens that the places are all connected to an outfit called Core Scientific that you tried to buy.”
Cramer noted delays at complexes in Texas, Oklahoma and North Carolina.
Intrator said the companies have been working together on infrastructure for a long time a would continue work to bring it online. He did not directly confirm that Core Scientific is the third-party provider.
CoreWeave tried to acquire Core Scientific for $9 billion earlier this year. Core Scientific shareholders voted against the proposed deal. Core Scientific shares sank 7% Tuesday.
During CoreWeave’s quarterly earnings call on Monday, JPMorgan Securities analyst Mark Murphy asked if the delay was related to Core Scientific, but Intrator declined to name the company. At another point in the call, the CEO suggested that just one data center, not multiple sites, were affected.
“There was a problem at one data center that’s impacting us, but there are 41 data centers in our portfolio,” Intrator said.
At a different point in the call, CoreWeave’s CFO Nitin Agrawal said the delays stem from “a single provider, data center provider partner.”
When reached for comment about how many sites were affected, CoreWeave did not provide a number and pointed to Intrator’s statements on the earnings call and during his “Squawk on the Street” interview.
CoreWeave, which provides infrastructure for artificial intelligence companies, reported third-quarter results on Monday that showed $1.36 billion in revenue for the period, up 134% from $583.9 million a year ago. But CoreWeave now sees 2025 revenue coming in between $5.05 billion and $5.15 billion, below the average analyst estimate of $5.29 billion.
Intrator told CNBC on Tuesday that CoreWeave has teams of employees working with contractors and Core Scientific at those sites “every single day” to get things back on track.
“It became apparent to us in Q3 that there were delays at the facility,” Intrator said. “CoreWeave responded by deploying our own boots on the ground to ensure that everything was being done in order to move those facilities along as quickly as possible.”
Intrator told analysts on Monday that the delays would not affect its backlog or get the full value from contracts.
Core Scientific did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CoreWeave has been on a deal-making blitz as big tech companies and AI startups race to build out their computing infrastructure.
The company announced in September that it agreed to provide Meta with $14.2 billion of AI cloud infrastructure, just days after expanding its contract with OpenAI to $22.4 billion.
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