It is because Apple will use their own authentication-key approach with Apple passkeys, which stores a key pair on a person's iPhone.

Another pet peeve is: why can you auth with your watch but not your phone?

It would be nice, but the phone would have to be unlocked at the same time you try to authenticate on the computer for this to work. Part of why it works with the watch is that you have to have an unlocked (but pin-lockable) watch near the computer. Most of the time when you're wearing the watch it will be unlocked (this is the default behavior, after unlocking it stays unlocked while worn) whereas the phone will relock itself. So it would be useful, if you happened to have already unlocked your phone near your laptop, but probably not as consistently useful as the watch. Most of the time, you'd find yourself unlocking your phone to unlock your computer which is not really convenient, so you'll just unlock the computer itself.

This would be useful in the case when laptop lid is closed. TouchID/FaceID are still very fast

The Magic Keyboard for Apple Silicon macs has a Touch ID button. Works great.

You can do this with a chromebook and an android phone. I find it is more comfortable and faster to just type in the pin vs unlocking the phone, so I don't use it much.

MacOS doesn't believe in PINs. It's passwords or touch id.

I'm glad my windows PC only requires a PIN :)

It’s not that different than initiating an Apple Pay for. Safari on Mac and reaching into your wallet on your iPhone. The framework is there. The UX would be to get a prompt in a similar way and Face ID unlock

small returns on a small market for prioritizing the work. maybe you're unhappy with the profit seeking system

Are software developers really a small market?

There is probably low priority/ignored because most developers can easily do this on their own, so it's not really worth the hassle.

Some googling shows ~20 million software developers around the world. Some googling shows roughly 2 billion households globally and 50% of them have a PC in their household. So let’s say 1 billion PC users.

20 million / 1 billion = 2%

So yes, it seems like a small market relatively.

Remember Steve Ballmer?

Developers are incredibly important for an ecosystem and having them a bit more optimistic about a platform can be quite beneficial (for a very low price, even).

They were a significant portion of getting OSX to the masses, but became less and less relevant to Apple over time.

Just an FYI, 1Password can now manage ssh keys that you can authenticate with TouchID

Still they bother to compile ssh, git, they even got some custom OpenSSL binary. They definitely have some resources allocated for “non-profit” development tools.

Maybe.. but it would also make it way easier for 'normal people' to use SSH keys / signing.

Seems like a natural thing to have in keychain.