I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.
Still, I'm in my early 40s and I find myself baffled when I help my mom with her iPhone. I've been an Android guy ever since that was an option.
> "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone".
> I said that after a frustrating attempt to use a "feature-rich" telephone sometime around 1990. I'm sure the sentiment wasn't original, and probably not even the overall phrasing; someone must have thought of that before me.
You can still find some of the educational films: https://youtu.be/p45T7U5oi9Q?si=5fiNEiqccg41nxQb
Instead, ask them what they want to be able to do, and show just that. The temptation is to show too many things.
Also, you can still configure an iPhone with no passcode, which is honestly the way to go, probably.
Literally happened this month with iOS 26 on my family iPad. Suddenly it had a passcode and I knew exactly why.
Today the setup experience on a brand-new iPhone or Mac is abysmal. Entering the same username and password multiple times - then sometimes a different username and password - competing notifications, irrelevant feature nags, a popup from some random product manager about their pet thingy. Permission questions from some meddlesome privacy team about the feature you just said you wanted to turn on. Uncertainty about whether you’ll break something irreparably by “skipping” the expected setup path. A choice of several inscrutable interface modes because no one has the balls to commit to a single solution. Just terrible.
I guess this is what happens without a dictator to tell people they’re fired for shipping garbage, and when a company worries about meeting quarterly KPIs rather than doing something great.
I remember switching to Mac years ago to avoid this type of user-hostile crap in Windows.
Preference panes used to be customized for each function to do what was necessary. Often there were hidden sheets with additional features for power users.
Now everything is just lists. Lists of identical looking, but actually very different settings. List of permissions that drill down into more lists which may or may not be what you want. The lists are unsortable and the order seems arbitrary.
I’m sure there was some push to SwiftUI preferences, but in my opinion, Scott Forstall’s Maps decision pales in comparison to the mess that Settings continues to be.
First the forms were incredibly bad for a new Swedish user. Then there turned out to be some kind of sync issue between account creation and when it can be used, but the error message did not reflect that in any way whatsoever. The next day the same thing worked.
On the one hand they have a support chat to contact and it's great, just being able to contact an actual person was a shock. On the other hand support couldn't help with my problem and I would not recommend the onboarding experience to anyone.
I'm never buying a mac again if I can avoid it.
I'm not sure what's worse: the inane keyboard compared to Linux or the ridiculously dumbed-down featureset that makes it effectively impossible for a power user to even try to transition into macOS.
Unless you want to ship her over to Linux Mint or something similarly not mainstream, but actually user friendly.
I doubt Jobs would have let things get this bad. He would have been ruthless if he had noticed the setup and nagging being this bad.
It was also illuminating how complex sharing app purchases can be. Some apps allow it, some apps it’s a different payment tier to enable it. It was unclear who had paid for what app and why they didn’t show up on some devices.
This should be possible? Or at-least it was when I was still using an iPhone, which was less than a year ago.
You can individually turn off 1) voice activation phrases, 2) press and hold side button, and 3) double tap bottom edge to type
For the flashlight, I assume you're talking about on the lock screen. You can customize the lock screen and remove that button entirely. If he has a newer iPhone, flashlight is probably a good use for the "Action Button" on the left, if he doesn't want to use that for toggling ringer/vibrate.
The human brain has a natural upper limit in how many times it's beliefs can update per year. If the Total new features shipped by every company in the land, every year exceeds that limit, most of it is a gigantic waste.
Large, cash rich companies beyond a point attract opportunists. And soon they outnumber innovators.
After that happens we get run away Involution (change without purpose).
There is never ending amount of work going on, hyper specialization, elon/trump style self glorification/back patting, and all happening with very little purpose or meaning being produced.
The solution is well known. Orgs which have purpose are tuned into the Limits baked into the system.
Ultimately, I don't think it's to her detriment. There would be some ease of mind if she had a cell phone and were comfortable using it (over a home phone) but tech is not for everyone.
Things like double click a mouse is difficult to perform two very fast clicks, without also moving the mouse,
Same with iPhone, swiping without deviating, pressing TINY buttons, and even what constitutes a tap are difficult for the elderly. Yes there’s zoom but that only makes it 10% better, as I watch them
I dread the day my older mom updates her iOS and calls me for help.
The UI reaction feels more delayed now. If i'm in the middle of a call and want to go private, or some how got connected to the slow network, and i want to switch to the other one.
I feel like I used to be able to do it with 2 or 3 simple clicks. Now i cant remember if i need to click once, or click and hold, and by then the animation changed and now I tapped again and its doing something i did not expect.
For me personally, I used to be a wiz at navigating this phone on older OS versions - and now i feel like a klutz and it doesn't do the thing I expected anymore.
My mom wanted conservative social media. I just had to install it, and off she went.
She barely answers phone calls correctly. She can't pull up her contacts or voicemail. Google maps is something that somebody else needs to do. The refusal to learn is solid and hard.
What to do? Parents.
And that's it. Complete refusal to learn. She uses her phone daily but struggles "to go back," pressing every x and back button until there's nothing, then finally swipe up to reach the iPad/iPhone's Home Screen. She's not that old.
What's her favorite novel?
Load it as an epub and spend as much time as you wish in visits reading it to each other.
Make her run the ereader app. Expand on that.
If you don't want to spend time in this way, connect her to the grandchildren on facetime. Wow is that a critical function that I was not expecting.
This is why I believe the future lies in touchless technology, like META Glasses. We should be able to control devices using voice commands or simple hand gestures. The need to touch icons or swipe feels outdated.
I fear the day Facebook finally kills it and I have to navigate the nightmare that are tablets, their ever-changing UIs, and endless unprompted prompts.
I think that if it were simpler, I'd be less inclined to do more with it than it is actually useful for.
In particular.
Selecting anything is a struggle. No exceptions. And selecting more than one screenful is a horror.
Scrolling often clicks on something I didn't want to click. And just try grabbing that invisible scroll bar.
Any auto correct or suggest is ludicrous. I had to kill them all.
Swipe text refuses to type "and". I get Anna's or Ava ( that was a live demo) regularly.
Searching for an image is good for laughs, except for ocr'ed text.
Paste? HOLEY MOLEY. Any "action after a delay" infuriates me, especially when it's hit-or-miss. Give me a paste button!
These are "99%" things, not outlying operations.
Disclaimer: the ipad with keyboard case, trackpad, pencil, ARROW KEYS!!!, and BT mouse is better. Almost a laptop, but right/control click is NOT macos like.
Okay, enough rant. It's basically the clumsiness, compared to the precision of a desktop, that gets me.
Advantage? I can use it on the easy chair in the living room.
No $1800 computer chair. The desktop is harder on my anatomy.
Just to say that some "features" stink regardless of user age, though no doubt harder in seniors. I figure out one of the 140,000 obscure options/tricks via internet search, something that decades of experience helps me do, but especially in recent years, is next to useless for normal people.
And! When switching apps, more often than not, safari loses all my typing in a text area!!!
I lucked out this time.
Time spent learning, training and relearning your cellphone is time forever lost. I chose a different path and refused a cellphone for years. A year ago I got one. I use it for "away" situations only (when I'm out of pocket). Otherwise it sits in my office, just like my old AT&T phone did. If someone needs to get me, there's always e-mail.
But, but, but I really cannot get along with mobile phones! Whenever I pick one up I swipe or press the wrong thing. Just answering a call usually goes horribly wrong! And I have literal nightmares about it. So I am pretty much stuck with my VOIP landline, but am worrying things like my bank will stop supporting the tech.
Luckily, I guess I've done my three-score-years-and-ten, so I don't probably need to retrain. But I can completely understand non-techie oldies having problems.
1. The setup process should have a heavily simplified mode right at the beginning. It may not be simple for Apple to decide what to exclude from the standard setup process, but there are several obviously time consuming, annoying and unnecessary steps in it. A lot of behaviors with side button double click, camera button swipe, etc., should be off by default.
2. There should be a very short test on finding out the accessibility needs of the user (to the extent possible, because some people may not know how to follow written or spoken instructions).
These are not just for the elderly, but also for many others who have accessibility needs, who lack knowledge about gadgets (or can’t be bothered keeping up with changes in interfaces and disappearing physical buttons), who just need something simple that serves a few actions (like phone calls, video calls, taking photos, viewing received photos and videos, etc.).
For the sake of our parents, we (as technology builders and buyers) need to be more comfortable saying the latest iPoop Galaxy S might be just not the right choice for a big segment of our society, and we need to make phones with buttons.
dangus•1h ago
Alternatively, I think OP actually should look into the accessibility mode (“Assistive Access”) because it doesn’t take “hours” to configure. It basically turns the iPhone into a wildly easy dumb phone-like experience.
hahn-kev•49m ago