eli5: why do people use PINs for smartphones but passwords for their computer?

Question

i don’t understand this, they are both equally important, so why use a less secure unlock on one?

In: 5

Answer 1

It’s a heritage thing. While computers have had keyboards since forever, phones had numbered buttons until quite recently, where typing a long password was majorly inconvenient. While phones became more like computers, both in design and importance, the PIN unlock has remained the default method. Password, fingerprint, facial recognition and others have since been added.