My mom's experience with an iPad
alexknight.net
alexknight.net
A few months back we got her an iPad. She instantly took on to it. She was emailing recipes, sharing pictures and connecting with friends and family on Facebook within the first week. She picked everything up surprisingly quickly. Seeing the iPad have this effect on a person who hasn't used a computer for more than a day or two in ther life time was shocking.
I have a feeling my mom is going to start using her iPad more instead of just watching the cooking network while on the couch. The biggest problem with cooking shows is you can't really follow along while on the couch which is frustrating. You're inspired to cook, but you have to run to the kitchen. Instead of having a TV in your kitchen, an iPad on a stand with your favourite cooking app seems like the ideal way to go.
convinced him to buy an ipad on launch day. he's now super Internet savvy, and I've never had to show him how to do anything.
the power of the device is that it is so natural, and it brings the benefits of the Internet without any background knowledge required.
it's going to take over the world.
Huh? I have never owned or used an Apple product, and since I don't watch television I don't think I have ever seen an Apple commercial, and I have called programs "apps" for over a decade. It is a common term across all OSes.
It first started with Steve Jobs calling them "apps" then eventually Apple started renaming everything in iTunes and their documentation from "applications" to just "apps". If your non-tech savvy parents start using the term "app" then I'm pretty sure that speaks for itself and Apple deserves some credit.
It saddens me how much of this marketing mythos of "Apple invented $ANYTHING_COOL", even when it has existed for a long time, is so prevalent. It would not surprise me if someone out there was trying to claim apple invented skinny jeans and Jobs was the first jazz musician.
"Web apps" has been around for a LONG time. "Apps" meaning general applications also predates Jobs.
I don't doubt it's more common now that millions of people have an iOS device that connects to the AppStore, but it was by no means an obscure piece of jargon pre-iphone.
kb
The App Store was launched in July 2008...
So that's another mom's experience.
My brother and I got her an Apple TV for Xmas and so far that is going very well. Netflix is a hit (after we convinced her she wasn't paying for each show) and so is Flickr to see the grandchild on the big tv. It also helps all the video Dad has from iTunes.
What are the cooking apps you're going to recommend?
Spent a good minute staring at the device once it was on trying to figure out where Firefox was on the screen she was on.
Spent a good minute, once I told her she needed to use Safari, wondering how she could bring up a keyboard to type the address she wanted into the browser.
Spent a good minute once she was on the sign in screen for gmail trying to figure out how to enter her username/password combo. Then she spent another 30 seconds looking for the enter key.
Once she was inside gmail the delete key took a mentioning, moving to the next page of her inbox was a lesson in futility, and while her fingers are substantially smaller than mine, she couldn't work the checkboxes without selecting the row above or below the one she wanted.
Apps? Apps? Are you kidding me! (trying to do my best Jim Mora impression)
While the iPad is great, and personally I love mine (doesn't hurt that I won it from a Rackspace marketing survey), it has huge way to go before it passes the Mom test.
I'm sure that after learning that the keyboard comes out automatically and having used it for a while she can do it in 30 seconds without having to think about it.
I got my parents an ipad about a month ago. My mom has a macbook air and my father an Imac but now they use the ipad much more than the computers. They got it really fast compared to OSX that they still don't understand completely.
Also it's normal to not hit what you want the first time you use a touch screen. It even took me some time to get accurate at it.
I bet they would have loved to use an iPad in the living room and in the kitchen before they had a laptop but it just doesn’t cut it anymore. They are used to their laptop.
(This equally applies to other “alternative” devices. A Chrome laptop would be so close to perfect for my parents. Google Chrome already is the one program they use all the time on their laptop. But Google Docs just isn’t good enough.)
So far, she really likes it. The first thing she figured out was that the dock plugs into the computer and the iPad plugs into the dock, so she didn't even know about the onscreen keyboard until I told her to unplug it (about 30 minutes after she got it).
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to really observe how she uses it, as she lives a few thousand miles away, but she seems to really enjoy it, compared to her slow, heavy, unreliable, and virus-laden Windows laptop.
But that's Ok. The important thing is, we're evolving together. (Ok, it's technically a benevolent dictatorship, but you get the idea.)
If you want to see this board have different sorts of content, poke around and submit interesting content for us to read. I assure you, Hacker News does not have a monopoly on interesting technical content. The reason it does get the quality of content that it does is that people like you are free to submit stuff that's cool. And if this week is a little slow, forgive us a bit - it's the holidays, and people are distracted from reading technical papers for a bit.
If next week you still find we're not the droids you're looking for, there's plenty of other great tech sites on the internet - but I sincerely hope you don't leave because you felt you couldn't make a difference here. Try to think positive - I think it'll help both your enjoyment here and people's reactions to your comments - and have a great holiday.