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Comment by 8ytecoder | Hacker News Reader

A tool for children to remotely manage parents' phones, tablets, routers and (may be) computers would be nice to have. My parents are not very tech savvy and when something goes wrong getting someone to fix it takes forever. If I had remote access I'd do it in just a few minutes.

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My solution to this is loading them up with iOS and macOS devices, enabling iCloud backup, and having them live near an Apple store for hardware issues.

They can click on all the shady links they want, but I haven’t had to field tech support in a long time.

I've had pretty good experiences with handing them Linux machines (usually openSUSE + Xfce). There's an initial adjustment period as they figure out "okay the orange fox replaces the blue e", but quite a few people I know who made that switch are now at least reasonably productive. Chromebooks are another option here that I've seen be pretty successful, and they have the advantage of being absurdly cheap.

The absolute biggest bang for the buck: ad-blockers. Fewer sketchy links to click on, and absolutely nothing to relearn.

Seniors minds are less flexible to change so a consistently exact OS with exact functionality is best even it looks out of date to us. I had to hire someone to exactly recreate my mom's desktop and and find and install her 15 yo apps. This kept her going with searches and email for another five years when otherwise she would just have given up. Also in-home tech people who are very, very patient. I'd happily pay $100/hour not to do that.

This is tough for us too - we were even thinking of buying two iPads connected to their Cloud account, just so whenever they locked themselves out, we could mail them the one we have while they mail us the broken one.

The biggest problem for iPads is every time there's a software update, it asks you to set a keypad password. They set one, thinking they are guessing one they've already set, they don't remember it, and they get locked out every time.

> The biggest problem for iPads is every time there's a software update, it asks you to set a keypad password.

I don't think that's true. What iOS version did they experience this on?

Same. I got mine a used iphone4 mainly for whatsapp a few years ago and it was hard doing phone support for an 80+ year old. Harder when she can't describe the ux, interfaces aren't standard (back vs cancel vs < vs x), and in modern design few things stand out as tappable/clickable. Remote access would've been fantastic.

LogMeIn, Teamviewer, VNC..?

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