Lifelong Android user, and I know nothing about Apple, but when it came time for them to upgrade from their OG Razr's last year, I was at a crossroads. These people are tech illiterate. I ended up telling them to buy IPhone.

Believe it or not, they mostly figured it all out pretty easily. They still get confused and scared by FB video calls coming in, but otherwise are able to talk, text, use social media, etc. So much so they even bought an iPad.

It seems the reason I like Android - tons of options and customizability, are the exact opposite of what an older user wants from their device.

It's a true testament to the intuitiveness of Apple UX.

Switched parents over to Mac/iPhone years ago too. They still have issues, but it's usually something like "I maximized my window, how do I get out of that?". I wish Apple would release a "dumb mode", which removes 90% of the already limited UX features of macOS/iOS.

Have you seen Assistive Access? https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/welc...

"Assistive Access is a distinctive iOS experience, with more focused features and a simplified user interface, which allows people with cognitive disabilities to use iPhone with greater ease and independence."

There are blind people who can type faster than I (sighted) can on an iPhone.

One big issue with older folks is change. While the Assistive Access might be awesome, making such a significant change will be tough.

The gestures on iPhones come to mind. I'm used to them and find them indispensable now, but what? Swipe down on one side and it brings me some controls, swipe down on the other and I see my lock screen? Where am I? What's happening? No reason or logic.

Smartphones in general tend to completely ignore the fundaments of human interface design.

I think it's much simpler than that. For normal people, the aesthetics of an experience is the experience. There is no functionality, form is functionality.

Apple does this more than anyone else as a side effect of different design goals. An iPhone competes with the 1990s-era cable TV-equipped television, not an Android phone, especially for older adults. In that comparison, you can see how the iPhone "UX" could be "improved:" how could it achieve the same level of effortlessness as switching a channel, an idea of an aesthetic experience distilled to a brand name and a button press, and then having the aesthetic experiences you like transferred to you continuously, nonstop, throughout the day, affordably?

You are talking about watching YouTube specifically, and consider that if your grandma could "just" watch a channel with a mix of Chinese and English content she "likes," she would be even "happier." I am not trying to get into the normative argument over which aesthetic experiences are more meaningful or preferred or whatever. It's a way of looking at things differently, without the myopic point of view of frontend web development.

Once you deconstruct your lived experience of watching your grandma, "Apple UX" looks more like a marketing idea that is inferior to many alternatives.

This is the kind of comment that becomes a downvote magnet. An unusual look is the point.

I don't think it's true that there's some frontend-web-developer-graphic-design-nerd-sense-of-UX superiority to iPhones compared to Android phones. That's what this is about. There's a bunch of observations written here by non-elderly people trying to reason about why iPhones work better for the elderly than Android phones or whatever. Man, just get them a cable TV subscription and pay for it, because that's what they really want: free TV. That's what everyone wants.

It's only in this country that iPhones have such high market share. The fact is, Android or iPhone, the end user is mostly using it to consume the same garbage - mindless freakshow television in TikTok and YouTube.

Mostly couldn't be more true of a generalization either. The sum of the time spent on consuming linear video content on phones is probably like, 90-99% of the time spent on the devices. Even accounting for people playing long session video games in Asia, because children are overall a small part of the population, and adults are for the most part not playing games.

All of these hard, true facts about how utterly narrow an average user's usage of phones attacks sacrosanct magical thoughts in HN readers' heads regarding the diversity of the experiences people are having on computers. They think it's this wondrous world of diverse meaning. There's some truth to that. It may be you and I are having wondrous diverse meaningful experiences. But the average person is scrolling TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.

People who disagree and downvote: at the end of the day, how do you know? I mean, have you ever seen the engagement statistics for Apple Photos? For a banking app? Making phone calls? No! But there are countless surveys, all pointing to ridiculous numbers of hours spent in TikTok. 90m a day on average for Americans. That means 1 in 5 people may be spending 180m too! Who do you know spends 90m a day taking photos, banking, making calls? It's far more rare. You can look at the engagement for Google Maps and Spotify, which may be the only non-social media, non-TV apps with high engagement, but it would be intellectually dishonest to count Google Maps - you're using your car for navigation with an appliance, not your phone - and Spotify is an aberration, although still passive mindless consumption, a better more affordable UX compared to radio. If you could watch TV while driving a car, people would, and that would be it for radio and Spotify.

So of course a phone can converge a bunch of other activities. But it doesn't mean that I'm wrong. I know they have a bunch of functionality. The question is, does it matter? No. The average person wants freakshow TV. I'm not the first or the last person to say this. It has never been so stark though.

Your argument is basically pure conjecture, everyone in the thread was talking about their personal experience with elderly family members. And your argument is there is no difference between the two devices, based on surveys for the usage percentage of TikTok? Are you kidding me? Has the thought not occured to you that elderly people might be a minority and outlier in such a survey?

Even granting that 90% of elderly screen time is spent watching TikTok, that does absolutely nothing to prove your claim that there is no difference between Android or iPhone for this purpose. Someone above mentioned a simple example of the differences between the two. Androids have an airplane mode toggle in their notification tray while iPhones don't. This is pretty much the sole reason for elderly Android users constantly turning on airplane mode, a problem which is almost nonexistent with iPhone users.

I am not really talking about IT burden for your family or whatever, which I also think is erroneously attributed to UX. Of course, if you wanted to reduce your IT burden, you could just say, "No," and nothing bad would happen. They would figure things out.

> And your argument is there is no difference between the two devices, based on surveys for the usage percentage of TikTok?

Yes. I mean, isn't that the definition of form versus function? I'm trying to show you that the primary function of these devices is really, "Watch TikTok," which is a colorful way of saying, consume linear video content effortlessly. Everything else is dwarfed. Another POV is, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube all agree with me: they don't charge more to show ads to Android users compared to iOS users, they charge more for targeting and the size of that audience in unexpected ways, but not in a way that makes sense for, "iOS users are better." Even if I agree with you that they are!

What people observe is true: Do I think the aesthetic experience of an iPhone makes these normal educated people more confident in solving their problems themselves rather than asking you? Yes, but that's a different thing than UX. There are lots of grandmas using Samsung phones, and I think that's because Samsung, as a manufacturer, cares about the aesthetics more. Maybe not OUR grandmas, but grandmas everywhere else in the world.

> Has the thought not occurred to you that elderly people might be a minority and outlier in such a survey?

Elderly people definitely watch average, meaning LARGE, amounts of television. I think they are also going to be average users of TikTok. Everybody who touches TikTok likes it.

These might seem like minor issues to us, but they can derail non-technical users who may be confused why the list looks different from the last time they switched languages. And this lack of coordination between elements is par for the course for Google design. Not saying there aren't examples of bad design from Apple, but most of their products seem to have someone in a position of authority who pays attention to detail and their issues seem less like oversights than bad decisions.

Somehow I always find it's on the secondary language and I haven't worked out if I'm doing that by accident or it's changing on its own.

The "hold the space bar" method is entirely your keyboard's feature, not Android. Though it is a relatively common pattern in keyboards on both OSes, in its defense (iOS uses it too).

But I don't think I'd recommend Gboard to someone who needs a simplified experience. Gboard is very complicated.

Exactly. I'm not keen to attempt to explain the distinction between an input method and a keyboard language setting to a five-year-old or a reluctant 85-year-old. Nor am I keen to troubleshoot how they managed to get something as basic as a keyboard into a weird state.

Don't get me wrong, I personally appreciate the flexibility, use Android on my personal device, and I help my folks and some of my uncles when they run into an issue on their Android phones that they can't solve after a little searching. But through trial-and-error I've concluded that any family members who reach out to me at the first sign of trouble need to be in the Apple ecosystem.

With Android... it depends on the manufacturer. But mostly it's much more complicated and you'll have to find long-term stable apps (good luck![1]) because the OEM probably bundled ad-ridden or obtuse stuff.

1: https://forum.fairphone.com/t/simple-mobile-tools-sold-to-zi...

I am not impressed at all by Apple's UX. Inconsistencies abound, and there are lots of hidden gestures and actions that you have no clue about unless you stumble upon them or someone shows you. It might be better than Android, but that's a low bar.

* Press ⌥ while hovering over the green circle. The icon changes to a + sign and clicking it uses the maximise behaviour.

* Double-clicking the title bar.

* From the menubar: Window > Zoom.

Double-clicking the title bar, a typical Apple feature that is totally undiscoverable except by stumbling upon it or having someone show you.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchlp2469/mac

In addition, macOS and iOS come with a “Tips” app (yellow with a lightbulb icon) which covers several topics.

What they’ve done with the CMD-? keyboard shortcut that nobody knows about has to be the most brilliant UI that nobody uses.

The intuitiveness of the Apple UI is not a given. A friend of mine was one of the first Mac developers, and an Apple man since then. He's old now, and both he and his wife grouse about the iOS UI and how unintuitive and difficult it is. Even my wife, also a lifelong Apple fan, finds herself frustrated when attempting to do tasks with her iPhone much more obscure than "launch app". Like the iPhone has a built-in Apple TV remote, but to use it you have to swipe down from the upper right where the clock is, then press the button that looks like an Apple TV remote (assuming you know what one looks like). Not something you can easily discover or figure out on your own. I can't even keep straight where to swipe from.

I think some time after Jony Ive took over Apple's design department, design wankery supplanted human factors. The original Mac UI was made functional and easy to discover, and then made pretty. Modern iOS is made pretty and clever with things like "pinch to zoom", but the emphasis is not on making things easy to discover or making it clear what you can do (but the "launch app" case is pretty well solved for).

One of the most important, and basic, things to do is make sure ad blockers are installed on devices and/or on a firewall. This matters before a broader decline in cognitive functionality too.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see a blanket ban against all digital advertising for certain age groups in the EU within the next 10 years.

The iMac really is just subtracting value from their life. The phone and tablet are fantastic, but I want to hire someone to break into the home and steal that computer.

iPad could probably work for my mom, but she just uses hand-me-down macs from my dad or me/my siblings.

Until few years ago he was a proficient digital photographer with advanced Photoshop knowledge. He was definitely tech literate and also have used Apple gears its infancy (the first guy in town to own an iPhone).

But now he forgets his passcode, or the fact that he can just use his thumb to unlock the phone. He keeps deleting his bank app and then goes to the nearby computer store shop to get it back. He also saved a scammer number claiming to be his daughter with a new phone (well, actually asked a friend to save it because he forgot how to do it).

Because we live abroad it's quite hard to check on him and his device to make sure he's safe and have been wondering myself how to best deal with the situation.

If somebody's lucid enough to use technology, put them on Apple stuff. If they're not lucid enough to use technology then Apple or Android doesn't matter – both are unusable.

For me it came simply down to the simplicity of the iOS system. There are fewer clicks, buttons and functions for her to accidentally get into.

Another reason is also that my other siblings (and all of the grandchildren ) are all on iPhone, so I am not a her only IT support person in case one was needed ASAP when I would be unavailable.

Personally I don't enjoy the feel of iOS but for her it is perfect.

For the 99% of use cases elderly people have with a phone, what exactly is it you imagine that Apple is doing better than Android? You click an icon to text, phone or browse the web. The experience is nearly identical.

The idea that Android has lots of customization, but Apple doesn't, is a myth; even Apple has far more options to tweak than the average use is ever going to have to get into.

Generally if you ask any IPhone user how to do X, or even Google it, the results should work exactly the same on your phone. This is definitely -not- the case for Android.

Macos ui is largely frozen in 2002ish

IOS is frozen in 2008ish

This is why blind people only ever use iOS.

(Linux user myself)

That's not why. It's because iOS has great features for the blind, and iOS developers care about accessibility and making good apps.

But if you're blind, I bet youd hate the UI you cant see and you've memorized changing under you.

Consistency? Everything is all over the place for different apps.

> Macos ui is largely frozen in 2002ish

> IOS is frozen in 2008ish

This is verifiably extremely incorrect? Lots of things about the core UX of both platforms have changed since then. Heck, even turning an iPhone off isn't as simple as "press and hold the power button" anymore.

Don't forget the detours! At one point (purportedly) MS had a phone and they made their desktop look like a phone UI.

Most people you talk to dont notice any change until they pick up a device not updated for the better part of a decade

Go back to the late 80s and compare Mac GUI to window's. There are still important themes in the Mac UI that remain, specifically the menu bar at the top. I could get around System 1.0 even though Ive never touched a classic OS mac.

Win 2.0? I grew up with pre-95 windows and Id be completely lost.

Id go further back, but then Id be comparing a GUI to a TUI. (Which to be fair are superior to GUIs)

Default logo sizes are larger, settings menus are basically the same no matter the device, software and hardware are coupled and designed by the same company making everything snappier. The subtle.design difference also come into play.

I use Android myself, but it is a fact that Apple is superior in UX, which is unsurprising given that they are obsessed with UX as a company in general and the whole ecosystem is designed by themselves alone, while Android is designed and developed by many players. Even a 2 year old can use iPhones and iPads.

Multiple fingers gestures doing different things, hidden swipe menus and features depending on the offset of where you swiped, that's all very hard for non experienced users.

Not that Android is perfect, I'd say it's still not great either in that regard but the UI is more discoverable for sure for beginners.

I really miss the win2k era in terms of user research and UX, sure it didn't look the best on screenshots but it was made to be as discoverable as possible.

It has zero ability to be discovered.

Its not good but so many people are decades entrenched they do not think about how annoying it is

I couldn't find "Find on page" on iOS/Safari, so I did a Google search on how to so it - result snippet on Google was cut and actual results page was full page of forum replies, and I was having trouble finding it by just scrolling.

Now years later (and only Android) I forgot, it was something rather non intuitive where they've hidden that option.

I can't think of any of those which are _required_, though. They are shortcuts, sure, but do not need to be known to use the device.

That's funny because I heard my friend say this at work yesterday when I suggested that he should gift his mother an iPhone:

"Oh my mother would have too much difficulty switching from Android to iOS. I know because I use iPhone and things that have dedicated buttons in some Android phones are gestures in iOS. Like the back button for example."

But it's not because the users understand Apple stuff better. They can learn the core workflows they use on any device, and they have most of the important parts written down anyway.

The primary reason she put them on Apple was so that they would have mostly the same problems and she could learn from one and apply to the others. I suppose this matters more the more relatives you manage devices for. But as you say, the range of opportunities one can get with Androids or PCs is much wider – which translates to a wider range of problems also.

If they only use basic functions (phone, text, email) then Android/Pixel + Chromebook is the way to go imo. One login for everything, including YouTube + music family plan. If they screw up the Chromebook just factory reset it and they're back where they left off.

I think iPhone being easier for seniors is a well advertised myth.

Another massive issue is that iOS doesn't really mark clickable elements / buttons anymore - after iOS7 redesign it's really hard for people to recognize what's a tappable element. Especially since a lot of apps now have their own UI design language.

You don't notice these things until you try to teach someone non-tech savvy. Then you notice just how inconsistent and horrible to use the new OSes are. Even Apple ones.

  - Difficulty typing on the tiny SE screen
  - Can't send text messages from the computer (no Messages on Chromebook)
  - Accidentally muting contacts all the time, so missing calls
  - Butt dialing all the time
  - Not being able to get back to the phone screen to find the speaker button and other basic ui functions were not intuitive
  - Spanning multiple ecosystems is a recipe for confusion (Apple photos vs Google photos, for example), and if you have to choose one Google wins (youtube, docs, chromecast, etc, etc).
  - Tons of text spam

After my mom in law got scammed out of a few hundred euros I confiscated her laptop and moved her to a Google ChromeBook.

That's quite locked down and a few years in she still hasn't managed to ruin the OS.

Now down to a home phone and an iPad with Facebook.

Yes, going the Apple route is more expensive. But unless you have a lot of time on your hands to deal with teaching weird Windows and Android edge-cases over and over again... well worth the investment. And even elderly Apple gear will generally serve your relatives well.

I did use to own an Android and switched to an Apple. I found that Apple products are more intuitive in their UX and setup (or really anything that was complicated to do on Android) just worked on Apple.

The only real issue he has is printing. His MBA is basically an AirPrint bridge at this point. One day we'll get him an AirPrint compatible printer.

0: https://youtu.be/cZSNhJcKFf4

Mother in law had a PC and a whole bunch of old Android tablets. I'd get a phone call about once a week asking some kind of support question.

When everything melted down and the PC got too old I got her to buy an iPad. Haven't heard a squeak since - she loves it, it does everything she wants and she's now totally self-sufficient.

Android phones have an "Easy Mode" which improves usability for seniors and anyone who prefers bigger buttons and simpler controls. I would expect enabling this may help.

How much I hope I could disable that one feature!

Hiding the Inbox folder in Email is another classic I need to fix monthly.

iOS 17 offers to disable all of this stuff on initial install if you set up a child account, because kids tend to get confused, especially by slide over. But they should probably offer that sort of thing as an "easy mode" option for all users.

I think the only thing better would be some kind of immutable OS, where each reboot restores it to its original state. I haven’t set up anything like this on hardware, but I’ve seen it as a VM offering.

Of course, if they are already used to some other system, like Windows, changing is probably more trouble than it’s worth. You could just really lock it down, so they only have access to certain applications and their home folder.

For the phone, if on iOS, Apple introduced Assistive Access not too long ago to dumb down the phone for people who might need it. You can control which apps they get, and present a simplified version of the apps.

https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/set-...

I thought that, too, but I installed Xubuntu on my parents PC, told them it works like Windows (like double click desktop icons to open programs, the X button in the corner closes them), showed them how to check email, watch Youtube, play solitaire, and shut down. I expected them to say "put it back like what it was", but after about 10 years, it never happened. I eventually showed them how to keep it up to date, but no big security issues ever happened like on Windows.

Turns out they stopped using the computer.

And even so, when's the last time Windows had a serious security issue? I've been out of the Windows loop for a while, but it seems the biggest vulnerabilities of the past few years are OS agnostic.

I set up a dual-boot Ubuntu install many years ago like this. It worked for years without me realizing — the Windows install had some problem, and my dad started using Ubuntu without telling me.

He watches YT videos all day and is paranoid about everything. End game was he managed to install two different VPN packages on one install and managed to install a system cleaner on another and spend about £500 in total and end up with two non working systems and higher blood pressure.

I think at this point he needs an iPad in a rugged case with screen time turned on and all his credit cards taking away. Possibly locking his hands in a box somewhere where they can't curse anything as well.

For someone just watching YouTube videos maybe it can work, but its also incredibly infantilizing too.

For the phone, she has an Android but I'm moving her to an iPhone at the first opportunity I get. I tried to talk her into a Macbook Air when she replaced the last laptop but since I wasn't there at the time they foisted another Windows machine on her.

Another source of problems is the endless email chains that her generation seem to love, they will forward all kinds of content that is all "hey this is funny watch this" sort of stuff, but turns out to be malicious in some way i.e. download this thing to watch the video, where the thing is some kind of hideous malware.

(please note: this is not an anti-religious post, but the malware makers seem to target those sites much more than anything else I have seen.)

I would guess it is because older people are more likely to visit, so setting up such a site or just buying ad space on it is a good way to target an older (and less tech-savvy) audience.

If ads are a problem there is pretty good solution: Firefox + uBlock Origin and perhaps some other extensions. Apple doesn't allow Firefox on iOS which is why I would never recommend it.

The thing I have a continual problem with is "accidental" rearranging of the home screen. "My xyz application has gone" is a continual complaint. (It's been dragged to another screen.) Accidental is in quotes because the young grandkids delight it rearranging it once they discover how.

There is no solution on iOS. Android can potentially solve this because you can replace the launcher. But only potentially, because I've yet to find a good "elderly friendly" launcher. Actually, it's not just "elderly only" as if I found one that allowed you to lock the launcher layout somehow, I'd use it. "Pocket rearrangement" of my home screen is far too common.

In general "aggressive simplification" of the UI is the key here. Provide just the things they use, and remove things they don't like "don't disturb". In the hands of an elderly person a "don't disturb" button hidden in the notification area becomes a "break my phone" button. Android does in principle all you to remove all of those. iOS doesn't.

They don’t have admin rights anymore most because of this. For some reason though their printer driver regularly pops a notification asking for admin privileges.

It's highly unlikely that an older person is going to successfully find, download and install a malicious .deb file, or follow the instructions to "copy this to clipboard and paste it with sudo" into their shell to compromise a linux machine.

Doesn’t ChromeOS do something like this?

Lots of weird directories with almost the right name, launch daemons, things that would re-install themselves when removed, etc.

the situation was basically nuke from orbit and start over.

this was a few os's back on intel. Maybe it's better now?

>The system domain contains the system software installed by Apple. The resources in the system domain are required by the system to run. Users cannot add, remove, or alter items in this domain.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Fi...

I’m sure it’s still possible to junk a system up, but a user shouldn’t be able to screw up the actual system files.

/Library is probably the biggest wildcard, as it impacts all users on the system, otherwise, creating a new user account should clean up pretty much everything, without having to reinstall the OS itself. I assume making a normal user account for the persons could allow the admin the ability to prevent the user from adding things to /Applications and /Library. The user would still be able to install apps using a ~/Applications folder and have settings in ~/Library. ~/Library is typically used automatically, while ~/Applications is something that needs to be created, but works just fine. I use this at work to install some things I would otherwise not be able to install.

Not exactly this name, but it might be a directory 'ApplicationSupport' instead of 'Application Support' or something like that.

I think I ended up doing a clean install on a days old back up to rid my self of it. It was years ago on an Intel Mac.

Stateless Windows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40127728

Good suggestion.

This is the Universal Write Filter (UWF) which descended from the earlier Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) in Windows Embedded.

Basically Windows runs like normal (i.e. from your Windows folder on the drive it is installed on), but any time there would normally be a need to write to the drive (for updating settings, files or whatever) the writes are directed to the RAM instead, so writes can be discarded as desired upon reboot for Windows to return to the reference state.

The UWF can be combined with Windows Kiosk Mode and it can be a foundation for a pretty well-mangaged stand-alone (or networked) desktop.

Alternatively, with a Linux Live desktop like you get when booted to a Linux Live "install" USB stick (without Linux actually being installed on HDD or SSD), the OS and entire file system itself runs from memory, and any updates or apps you install are also in memory only unless you enable "persistence", otherwise there are no routine writes to the USB drive and it reboots to the same reference defaults every time.

I looked into a few of these, but none of their OS update stories were good, it's confusing if anyone random helps out, and saving photos across reboots is fragile.

Simple, just set them up with NixOS ;)

I've had relatives go to other tech support places and usually it means they pay money for someone to upsell them on something else or tell them they need a new machine. Apple is fine supporting my parents who don't want a new iPhone. Yea, eventually it's out of support, but it's a long enough time.

I also love that the Apple ecosystem tends towards "you should be willing to pay money for something" rather than "let's see how we can scam money out of someone unwilling to part with their money." If you're techie, you know the difference between real stuff and fake stuff. When non-techies get a pop-up on their Windows laptop telling them that their anti-virus subscription is running out (that came pre-installed) and that they'll be vulnerable to all sorts of bad things if they don't pay $50, they get nervous and call me. Then I have to figure out (over the phone) how to uninstall the crap and get Microsoft Defender working.

Even Windows 11 is just becoming a pile of ads and other junk.

With streaming TV boxes, Roku ends up installing apps they don't know how to uninstall because if you press the play button while the TV is off, it installs whatever app they're promoting on the screen saver. Fire TV and Android TV are a mess of ads and it's hard to know what content you have access to and what you don't. I'm just so sick of relatives asking me "How did this app get on my Roku? How do I get it off?" and things like "How do I only see the shows I have access to? Why is it showing me Showtime when it tells me I have to pay when I click on it? I think dad might have subscribed to things because he didn't know what he was doing. How do I cancel that? No I don't know what he might have subscribed to."

Sure, you can say that Apple TV comes with the Apple TV app pre-installed, but it isn't constantly pushing things on you. Sure, Apple would like an iCloud subscription, but if my parents end up giving Apple $1/mo, I'm fine with that. The level of difference is simply astonishing. It's like having a store email you once "hey, we have new pants" compared to the stores that email you twice a day "HEY!!!! HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT NEW PANTS!!!!" You can say "they're both doing it", but there's a huge difference.

Apple isn't perfect, but I feel comfortable with non-techie people in my life having Apple products. They can get support when they need it at the Apple Store, Apple is happy with the money they've paid for the product, and I can put their technical needs out of my mind. They love it too. They get unlimited free access to helpful employees who fix their stuff faster than I can get to it. Yea, if you're techie you know how things work and what to look for and you can make decisions for yourself. When relatives buy non-Apple stuff, they're making a decision that I'm going to fix things for them.

Edit: For some issues like airplane mode, see if you can remove them from quick access.

tried that on my father's computer, and he decided it was "broken", so took it into a shop to get re-installed...

Mine was in the closet for a couple years once and I took it out, plugged it in, and just printed what I want through WiFi.

I remember dealing with HP drivers on Windows back in the day…

Contrast this with an HP printer I bought. I had to:

- manually install sketchy HP software on my mac

- use that sketchy software, through a USB cable to update the firmware on the HP printer

- somehow figure out how to get the HP printer to connect to Wifi

- get it working, and never touch it again

The older model is no longer available new from Amazon.

Is Brother still a good recommendation? This subscription pivot gives the company all the wrong incentives.

> Choose Brother Genuine TN830 Standard or TN830XL High Yield replacement cartridges. And with Refresh EZ Print Subscription Service, you’ll never worry about running out of toner again and you’ll enjoy savings up to 50%. (3) Get started today with a Free Trial. (4)

> (4) Requires enrollment in a monthly billed Brother Refresh EZ Print Subscription service plan based on monthly printed page allotments. Unused pages roll over, limitations apply. Additional page set charges and taxes apply during trial.

It's just saying that the free trial of their subscription requires enrolling in the subscription. The subscription isn't required to use the printer.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024...

"After a full year of not thinking about printers, the best printer is still whatever random Brother laser printer that’s on sale."

Kinda sad, in a way.

Yes, sometimes it's not sketchysite.com or the "make money fast" email, it is the printer manufacturer that's installing the garbage.

We put her on Debian with Cinnamon as the DE, and downloaded a Windows 10 theme. We even put the Windows 10 logo as the start button. For her, she has 0 idea that she's even using Linux except for the fact that her computer doesn't randomly "break" anymore. All this with the added benefit that I can do remote support far more easily now.

The other huge benefit is when other relatives come over and start poking and prodding, it's far harder for them to do any damage. A few times I needed to 'fix' things was because her 60 year-old son (who knows nothing about computers, but is a medical doctor so he must know what he's doing) would come over and install a bunch of scammy antivirus software, change a bunch of settings, then leave proclaiming that the problem was "fixed". Switching to Linux has helped at keeping his fingers out of the pot immensely.

- Linux Debian with default user privileges

- XFCE kiosk mode with everything as shortcut icons (that can't be deleted) + removed all UI access to everything else

- Monthly Borg save of the /home dir

- X2Go for screen sharing when assistance required

So that's the great thing with Linux: you can make it look exactly how you want (huge icons, etc.), and you basically just save the /home dir to save the "state" for the user. Downside is that config is a lot of work.

Consider sharing the work as open source. I think that too often people think of "mere configs" as something less than programming, not valuable and not worth sharing, when they are in fact really valuable. Not just the configs, but the curation, too.

If such a project caught on, I bet others would pitch in to smooth down the rough edges. In fact, it might be nice to merge and/or utilize a recovery distribution to restore such a configuration in the event of an issue.

In one relative's case with an old laptop, I installed some light distro, Firefox with an ad-block and it's been stable for a few years. She only browses a few favorite sites.

Other's infatuation with Apple's overpriced *nix boxes is a true testament to Apple's marketing department. Pay more for less. We can't spend so many thousands every few years.

It's also nice that the DEs I chose are relatively stable, not forcing them to keep up with changes. Running well on old and cheap hardware is also a plus, I couldn't convince anyone to buy a new or even used iMac (and wouldn't want to do that anyway, macOS is far from bug free...).

That said, none of them have self-destructive tendencies and I don't expect to just give them a device and have them set it up themselves.

I spent a few hours setting up Firefox with an uBlock and set up an email client, and that was it.

There was an awkward period where Wayland made screen sharing difficult, but switching to X made TeamViewer work again. From Fedora 39, I switched to using the built-in remote desktop function (RDP) + an always-on Wireguard connection, which makes screen sharing so smooth when I occasionally need to help with non-OS related challenges. This can also be used for SSH access, or whatever.

I recently went with Fedora Silverblue for another relative, which makes everything stay up to date without them noticing. So far it has worked fine, but installing the printer driver was a bit different than usual – but not a problem.

EDIT: Prior experiences has been primarily with macOS, and it has been a lot of trouble adjusting it to their needs and preferences.

Most of admin tasks are apt-get update/upgrade, rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty Bureau/* (because she creates empty directory on desktop). The command cupsenable DeskJet-3630-series allows to unstuck the printer without mouse access (I was on my phone with connectbot). I have changed the computer after 10 years. It was transparent for her.

My family was ultimately able to convince my grandmother to get rid of her computers altogether, when her dementia really kicked in. I think we were lucky as she never really got on with computers, and would tell anyone who'd listen how computers 'came in' to her office the year she retired (in the 90s) and so never needed to learn.

I’m with dad on this one! I have so much perfectly good hardware that becomes increasingly useless because Apple stopped providing updates, and 3rd party software developers insist that I’m running the absolute latest OS. I’m at that point yet again with an iPhone 7 that works flawlessly but when I go to get new apps, “SORRY LOSER. You need bleeding edge iOS for your bank’s stupid app!”

I’ll channel your dad’s aggression if I ever meet a Schwab software engineer in person. I complain to every Apple employee I know, too, but they all look at me like I’m crazy for not just buying a new phone every year.

Someone complains about bad food at restaurant. Defender responds "you fail to understand how cooking works".

> 3rd party software developers insist that I’m running the absolute latest OS

3rd-party food developers insist I'm running the absolute latest gut microbiome ;)

OK, dude. It's not like I've been in software for 25 years, 15 of them being on mobile, both on the OS side and on the third party app side. But, yea, I fail to understand.

On the 3p side, I've heard all the lame excuses, and they are almost all excuses rather than reasons. The big one is that supporting older versions blows up the test matrix (the number of device/OS/API level combinations that need to be validated). I can understand if you're a hobbyist, you might not be able to afford to buy the "myriad of different devices" and aren't staffed to test your app on each one. But if you are any kind of serious business, you signed up for this investment when you decided to write apps. Throwing a couple of older devices running older OSes onto that test plan should not blow your budget, and if it does, you probably shouldn't be writing that banking software to begin with. Also, almost all of your testing is automated, right? (Please say Yes). So it's not like you need to hire more human testers as your test matrix grows. If you are unable to support more than the bleeding edge OS, it makes me wonder what kind of fly-by-night developer shop you are.

The second excuse is about valuing developer convenience over users. "Oh, the new OSes contain cool new stuff that we want to take advantage of, and it's a total bummer to maintain the code paths that support 'legacy' devices." You already have the code that runs on the previous OS or API level, you're choosing to get rid of it, deliberately throwing users under the bus, so that you can clean code up or at least not have to maintain it. Bad tradeoff IMO.

There are a whole bunch of other little excuses for no longer targeting older systems, and most of them boil down to either cost, laziness, or a skill issue. None of them respect the end user.

I have a little more sympathy on the OS side. Sometimes a major step forward on the hardware (particularly the CPU architecture) might make it really tempting to cut off previous versions. I still think both major mobile OSes cut off old devices way too early. I have PCs from the early 2000s that can still run modern Linux distributions, so support for old hardware is usually technically possible, just inconvenient and costly. I'm not asking companies to support devices from 20 years ago, but they could.

Your "security holes" excuse is ridiculous: All major OS vendors already provide security updates to at least 5 previous major OS releases. There is no security reason for an app developer to support only the bleeding edge latest OS.

End result, even a simple "fart button" app has probably broken several times.

Surely no. Emg. Installing on phone?

She has a normal (not admin) user account on her Mac. She cannot install applications*. Her Documents folder is synced to iCloud. Everything is backed up with Time Machine, and for good measure I rsync her home directory to my own backup periodically. She uses a locked down Google Worksplace account (this cost more since we pay for one admin account and her restricted account). She can access everything from her iPhone and her iPads.

Surprises: some applications can be downloaded and will install themselves into ~/Applications, these usually are the thousand or so zoom/webex/webmeetinggo variants. Initially we did not lock down her Google Chrome and she kept installing "Extensions that will speed up your browser experience!" which of course were scams, so we locked her out of installing Chrome Extensions (this has made it difficult to legitimately install chrome extensions unfortunately). She has, through what I'm guessing were bad UI questions for someone now in her 80s, wiped out her Documents folder multiple times, syncing the deletions to her iCloud. Minimal actual loss since thanks to my paranoid backup strategies.

Hard: she's been using Macs on and off since the 1990s. Each new recent release of MacOS or iOS has become a bit of a nightmare. While I get the relentless need to upgrade and improve and sell more widgets I really wish there was an LTS strategy we could opt into that was just security or sev 1 style bug fixes.

Really hard: I fell into this because every time she went into an Apple Store or tech shop for support they 1) would ask her what her Apple ID was and then just go off and create another one for her anyway. I found six before I got her to understand it's just her email address. 2) Every tech guy has his own way of doing shit, myself included, and it's utterly baffling to someone who simultaneously has been using computers for decades and yet is very much non technical.

She's in her mid 80s now, I think we're on her last MacBook Air, which I just moved her to in the past year or so. The next upgrade, if necessary, is probably to a Chromebook.

IMO, macOS is the only consumer LTS desktop around these days. Windows UX is going a million miles a minute with new Copilot junk every other day, intrusive widgets, and an exceedingly unpleasant browsing experience with shopping, coupons, MSN and more Copilot.

Edit: forgot ChromeOS. It’s a proper mainstream LTS desktop.

Perhaps I'm stepping out of line by saying this, but: That Macbook Air isn't her last and the next upgrade will be necessary.

Yes, we all pass eventually, but death is horrible both for the individual and the loved ones, so it's worth "lalala"ing it away for trivial things like this and enjoying what time we have.

Anecdata: My mother passed five months ago. I was her tech support. I miss her, tech support and all.

I don't believe the app works any more, something has changed and I haven't investigated. I hope it's still useful for you!

When it works it's fantastic though. Ditto for FaceTime screen sharing.

If you do a FaceTime video call they can screen share from inside the call.. but it’s more steps for them.

If my wife could take control of her Father's iPad then both parties would be happier, as far as I have been able to discover this is something that isn't able to be done, by Apple software or third-party. If I found I out I was wrong that would be good.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/109365

https://www.macworld.com/article/672451/how-to-share-screens...

Some good ideas in this thread, though. I'll curate a list of recommendations and provide it to him and hopefully he can undo some of the negative patterns their systems keep forcing on them.

I carry a Pixel in one pocket and an iPhone in the other while lamenting the two decades since the deprecation of my Sidekick. Much like the discussion about older users here, it's tragic that we can't learn anything outside Apple Park from the SE or the mini showing the path to light and fast form factors. I know I'm not alone there as all my friends made the same half-deprecated choices.

A decade later, it's hard to blame Samsung for the Galaxy Note being so successful, particularly for older users who don't have my Coke bottle bifocals now that the entire Android market followed suit, even if they were a little late to the party.