Comment by koreth1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by koreth1 | Hacker News Reader

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My dad is 87 and I'm seriously thinking about buying him one of these. He wants a phone that will fit in his pocket, but his vision isn't great so he has the text size bumped up pretty high. Right now he's using an iPhone 15. Large text size on a small-form-factor phone, it turns out, makes a fair number of apps nearly unusable. For example, it's super common to see a dialog box pop up where the "OK" button is pushed off the bottom of the screen by the text, leaving you with no way to dismiss it. I frequently get tech-support calls from him that end up boiling down to that problem, and it makes using apps a pretty frustrating experience for him.

A device that fits in his pocket and that he can still hold in one hand when he's using it as a phone, but that has enough screen real estate to run apps in large-print mode without constantly breaking UI designs, would meaningfully improve his life.

Im not 87 and have great vision but I recently got some magnifying shop style glasses for close up work on tiny stuff. It also has the advantage of being like readers in that it corrects for close vision (closer point of focus) in addition to magnifying. That could also help.

This would actually be a growing market in 10-15 years due to increased life expectancy and every boomers has reached retiring age by then. Maybe Apple would introduce an iPhone optimized to be used especially for older people

I know my Pixel has an accessibility setting that is effectively "make this device more usable for older people." It gets rid of the home screen/app switching/go back gestures and replaces them with the old icons at the bottom of the screen, makes all the text and icons larger, and apparently increases the amount of time you need to press on the screen for it to count as a long press.

Apparently as you age, the capacitive touch sensitivity to your fingers goes down as well.

Iphone 15 counting as "small form factor" says a lot.

Good catch! I misremembered his model. He actually uses an iPhone 13 Mini, which definitely counts as small (by modern smartphone standards, anyway).

I encounter the same problem of unclickable buttons on my iPhone 15 fairly often. Sometimes I can make them reachable by switching to landscape mode, but not always. I’m 69 and do prefer larger fonts, though I don’t think my font size settings are causing the problem.

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