Password History On Mac and iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can access your Passwords History on your Mac and your iPhone. 

A new feature in macOS Tahoe, and iOS 26 as well as iPad OS 26, is the ability to save a history for each password in the Passwords App. That's the built-in Password Manager that comes with Apple's operating systems. So previously when you changed your Password it just simply replaced the old password. But now it does that but also saves a history so you can actually look at the old password. That can come in useful in some situations. 

So as an example here I'm going to use my course's website. I'm going to create a new user account and let the Password's App on my Mac generate a strong password for that. On this site I'm going to go to create account here. Then I go to a page where I can create a New Account. I'm going to enter in my email address and then when I get to the password field it's going to suggest a new strong password. This is the most important part of using a Password Manager is letting it generate long strong unique passwords of random characters. So I'm going to say Use this Strong Password and it puts it in and you can see the site is happy with it. It shows that it is a strong password. Now I'll click Register to register with the website. When I do that look what happens. I get a little box here that says, yes update the password for this site. So now I can be sure it's saved in the Password's App. 

But let's check anyway. I'll go to Passwords here and sure enough I'll see the entry for this site. You can see courses.macmost.com. There's the new password that's generated. The User Name. I can add notes if I want and I can view History. I click here and I can see Password Change, Password Saved. It may look a little different for you if you're registering with a new site but the bottom line is you're going to have this history here that's going to record that first password here in this History List. 

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Let's go back to the site. Let's say it is a month later and for some reason I want to change the password to the site. So, I'm going to go, in this case, to Account Details. Every website does it a little differently as to how you change the password. So you have to go to the site and figure out how to get to your profile or account settings or whatever it is and change the password. So I'm going to go in here and go down to this area here that shows Password Change. Then initiate a change on the website. I'm going to click on Current Password because this site, like a lot of others, requires you to enter in your current password to then change it to a new one. If I click here you can see that Password Manager on my Mac suggests the current password. So I don't have to type it in. That's the whole point of a Password Manager. Strong unique random passwords and you don't have to type them. You don't even have to see them. You can just confirm and the Password Manager will add it. If this wasn't the right site. If it wasn't Courses.macmost.com in this case then it wouldn't suggest this one. So, any phishing attempt to try to get you to enter your password into the incorrect site isn't going to work. Password Manager is simply going to not recognize the site. 

So, I'm going to enter in that new password. It asks me to confirm. There it is. Then it is going to go to the next field. It is going to recognize that this is a new password field and it is going to suggest a new strong password. Yes, I do want to use that. It enters it in in the New Password and Confirm New Password field because it recognizes that the site has both of those. It may be different on a different site. 

So now I'm going to click Save Changes to not only save it on the site, so actually make the change on this website, but it should also trigger the Password Manager of the Password's App on your Mac to record this. So I click here and sure enough it says, Yes, I do want to update this. So now I can see it has been changed on the website, and I should see it changed here as well. Sure enough if I look at the Password Field here I'll see the new password and if I go to view History here I'll see Password Changed just now. If I click here I'll see the new one as opposed to the old one.

Not what's the point in saving the old one. Well, one of the main reasons to do that, and one that I experience all the time is, sometimes you're not completely sure that the website actually got your password changed. Like you make the change and then you replaced the password in your Password Manager but did the website actually change the password. If there was a mistake, if there was an error, if there was an extra confirmation you didn't hit or something like that your password remains the old password. But now you've lost that old password because your Password Manager replaced it with the new one. 

Now you've got a History! So if something did happen on some website and the new password was not used, you still can go back into this Password History and get this old password. I know I've always used the Notes Field to actually to save old passwords. Copy & Pasting into the Notes whatever the old password was just in case.   But now I no longer need to do that. Another option you've got here that you should note is this Clear History Button. If you click that you can actually clear the history of all the old passwords if you need to. 

Now you also have this ability on the iPhone and the iPad. So you just go into your Passwords App there, as long as you are updated to iOS 26 or iPad OS 26, and you can look for that Password entry here because iCloud is syncing these between your devices. You can see here's the same entry in the Passwords App on the iPhone. You've got a View History Button there as well. So you can see the old password and the new password. You also have a Clear Button here as well. 

So this is a great improvement to all the Password Apps across all of your Apple devices. The best thing about it is there is nothing to do. It is just automatically records a history and hopefully you never need the old password but if you do you know where to find it. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.