Preparing a Mac laptop for your Grandma | Hacker News Reader

Preparing a Mac laptop for your Grandma

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75 pointstalos66 comments

An iPad makes much more sense for the very young and very old with their accessibility requirements.

The iPad is lucky in that it could start afresh with many ideas.

- They keyboard represents letters of the alphabet, and it only appears when it's needed, compared to my laptop keyboard which has about 30 obscure buttons that have almost no use to most casual users.

- You interact with only the content directly through touch, rather than through a mouse or touch pad that is on a perpendicular plane to the display.

- Making text bigger is as easy as pinch to zoom.

- There's much less that can go wrong as each app is sandboxed and access is limited. People can be more confident in their actions.

My 2 year old niece can quite easily play youtube videos yet I've seen my 90 year old Grandad struggle with a mouse, using his second hand to click the button. For either of them, there's little that they'd want to do on a laptop that couldn't do much more simply on a tablet.

In my experience with my own grandmother, gesture driven interfaces are significantly harder for older people to learn. Think about safari where you have double tap to zoom in. My grandmother does a bit of a hesitant tap when I give her my iPad to play games which sometimes leads to an accidental double tap. It would be disorienting to have it zoom in to a random spot.

Teach her to pinch zoom. Double tap-zoom is a power user gesture.

The problem described was not that she wants to double tap and can't: it is that she double taps without meaning to. Telling her about pinch zoom won't change that.

Pinch to zoom isn't so intuitive either. What happens when you pinch to zoom in Contacts for example. I'm guessing nothing. Of course you can tell by looking at something whether it is "pinchable" but it's not intuitive to know.

If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Some things aren't meant to be zoomable. Trying doesn't break anything.

The main issues are that gestures are not consistent across apps. So if I teacher her pinch gesture in one app, it might not zoom in another. If it doesn't do anything, she is most likely to get frustrated because to her, pinch gestures should zoom. I personally love gestures, but an interface that revolves around gestures might not be good for people who are already a bit afraid of technology

exactly what I did. Gave her (my grandmother, 78 years old) a macbook first and she never used it in years. Just too many different buttons to press. Gave her an iPad with Path, Safari, Pages and an AirPrint-Printer installed (all other app-icons hidden on the second screen) and she recently told me it was "the best gift she ever received"...mission accomplished :)

Totally agree. I found this out the hard way: bought my mom a mac, and then ended up buying her an iPad about a year later. Even with Apple's free training, macbooks are just too complicated for people who just want to get simple things done.

My 80+ year old grandfather was given an old MacBook. Basically it was handed to him. No instruction of any great substance was given. My grandparents didn't use the simplest computers prior to this. ATMs were off limits. The first call I got (which I had been dreading) was about 3 months later. The gist of it was that he had managed to get some old VHS tapes encoded (dunno how) into some file format and he was after a good way to resize them that would be easy to play back on a friends TV. Since then he has bought another laptop, an iPad and and iPod. TLDR I vastly underestimated my grandfathers abilities.

Your grandparents are a talented exception. Were either of them engineers or something else technical? Maybe they had more interest in experimenting more. In my experience, most non-techies young and old fear "breaking" their computer, so they don't do anything beyond what was taught.

In this case it sounds like the Grandma is playing Flash games online... Maybe a Chromebook would be a better option?

Most flash games have an App alternative though.

That's what I thought. My preparations would begin and end with selling the Mac (which hold their value surprisingly well, even when older than dirt) and buying a $250 Chromebook with the proceeds. All my older relatives use their computers for writing many and large emails. That's not really want I want to be doing on an iPad.

I would agree but for two things:

1. Chromebooks are either really cheap and slow, or really expensive (Pixel). There needs to be a middle ground.

2. Google doesn't let you create a local account on the computer without creating a Google account. I find that unacceptable for an OS.

> 2. Google doesn't let you create a local account on the computer without creating a Google account. I find that unacceptable for an OS.

I don't understand this problem. The entire premise of the Chromebook is that there is no such thing as a local account.

Similarly, my father bought my grandfather a large HP touchscreen all-in-one PC and an iPad. From what I can tell, he uses the iPad for most things during the day- web browsing, email, youtube) and the desktop PC almost exclusively for printing things and Skype. I think the desktop helps him with video chat, since holding the iPad at an angle where his face is visible for any prolonged amount of time seems to be problematic with him (also, he always covers the camera with his hands).

yep basically 100% agree. My grandmother got an iPad a while ago and its sooo easy for her to do everything. I think it helps that the iPad forces you to only be doing one thing at a time (e.g. when on the internet, you won't get a popup disturbing/distracting you. Or a notice from iTunes or some other program saying it needs to be updated. These are all distractions from your main focus - in this case reading the news or whatever)

Computers are great but a classic desktop offers too many distractions for my grandmother.

If your grandmother only uses Safari... why not buy her a Chromebook instead?

More and more general consumers are using their computers as internet terminals. A Mac or any fully-fledged desktop machine is overkill for that, and the Chrome OS interface is very, VERY usable for a grandmother. My grandma picked it up with little difficulty, and learned how to use an iPad without any assistance either. She's now downloading applications, buying music, and emailing plus surfing the Net on it.

A 13" MacBook Air just doesn't seem like the right option, especially considering it's $1199 when a Chromebook is less than a quarter of that ($249).

Chrome is different enough from Safari that I wouldn't want to deal with teaching it to a 90 year old.

Not really; Safari with the 6.0 update is markedly similar to Chrome. There's few differences left in all of the browsers. Most are homogenous with overlapping feature sets. Yeah, sure, Firefox has the advantage of extensions, Chrome has the advantage of Google's great services and webapps, and Safari has the plus of being bundled with every Mac, but in the long term, they're all the same thing.

The missing search box is enough to confuse my mom. Safari has a search and address bar, in Chrome they're the same thing. My mom would ask where the search box disappeared to. I guess it's possible to set Chrome to have a separate search box, though. I've never tried it so I'm not sure.

http://imagebin.org/259223

There's no search bar in Safari anymore; the search and path bars are the same thing, just like Chrome.

My grandmother didn't have much of a problem with it, all I had to do was tell her they both do the same thing now. She uses the iPad more but only because of the advantages of direct manipulation versus the small touchpad of the Chromebook.

Ha, it's been a while.

You mention your grandma learning about Chrome OS and learning about the iPad's OS. Which did she end up using more?

Did she ever have access to both at the same time? If so, which would she choose to google something simple like store hours?

Store hours, probably the Chromebook. She ended up using iOS more because of the versatility of it, but she still uses the Chromebook too.

Having done this before, if all that will really be used is a web browser:

  Sell the current laptop
  Buy a chromebook
  Use extra $$$ to pay for wireless service
  IFF you really need remote admin, add chromebook to google apps.

Everything will work and update reliably for a long time. You can't mess anything up. It's great.

> add chromebook to google apps

Good luck with that...

As of last year they sold managed Chromebooks in quantities of 1. I looked into it but passed.

Has that changed?

"The only app my grandma uses is Safari, really. Sometimes on the phone it's helpful to have her go to System Preferences."

Sounds like a Chromebook use case or a 'kiosk' mode Linux distro.

I have an ibook G4 running 10.04 fine and sympathise with the initial problem!

Totally agreed! I wasn't the decider on the laptop, however. :/

Well, then sell the Air and get her a Chromebook! $329 for the HP model, and it comes with a lower-res screen (no blurriness) and a very, VERY easy-to-use interface.

$1199 for a Web terminal is just way, way too much.

Or a tablet. I find my Mother uses her iPad way more than she ever used any other computer, probably in part because it's so easy to use she's not afraid to "break something".

My parents and in-laws (60's) have all transitioned from windows based PC's to tablets (iPads). So much easier on me from a tech support standpoint. Much easier for them from a usability standpoint. Most of their usage is web, email, and a handful of apps. It's intuitive, and it doesn't break. Unless someone needs a laptop or a desktop, they should be on a tablet.

Yes, indeed, direct manipulation is the way to go for this. Much simplified interface with large target sizes all the way.

> The pace of obsolecence on the Internet is unacceptable.

Or it's unacceptable that I can't buy hay to feed my horses every mile down 5th Ave in Manhattan. Sorry -- you're entitled to your opinion, of course, but it's a pretty silly thing to say. The world changes. Things progress.

Not to mention Apple especially does this. 68K -> PPC -> Intel, OS9 -> OSX, ditching Rosetta, and ultimately forcing everyone to update OSX regularly. My fiancee's Mom was forced to update to Mountain Lion to play her latest games, when Snow Leopard was more than fine for her.

The Macintosh has been around for 30 years. Three major transitions during that time doesn't seem like an abnormally high rate of change to me. DOS-based Windows -> Win95 -> NT during the same period is pretty close.

I also find it hard to blame Apple for the death of 68k and PPC. If you know what the dominant processor architectures will be in 2035, please tell me which stocks to buy :)

The DOS -> W96 -> NT transition didn't break compatibility. You can still run your DOS programs on your Win8 machine[1].

Powerbooks and iBooks, on the other hand, are paperweights today. Machines made in 2005 should be usable today (and indeed, the '05 Windows machines are still usable today).

[1] with Dosbox or virtualization, but that's not the point. Any similar measure is not available to run your m68k, ppc/classic or ppc/osx applications.

That's not the point, and your example is not very fitting. This is a person that just wanted to keep using current services like YouTube.

If "things [really] progress", they should not leave entire groups of people behind. On the contrary, progress is also about lowering the wall that prevents people to get in to the latest and greatest, no matter what their background is. Not raise it.

Having set up multiple pcs for friends and family I often got calls from especially my parents with "it says I should update something, I didn't know what to do so I closed the window, what should I do now?".

I found the solution (for windows machines) a tool called Ninite (http://ninite.com). It makes an installer with a lot of commonly used apps such as flash, chrome, java, Skype, TEAMVIEWER (for additional iFamilyTechSupport cases) etc. Every time you run this installer it automatically updates all of the applications with the newest version. Another bonus is that you don't have to click "next" or "install" and you don't have to worry about toolbars (no more Ask toolbars when updating java!!).

They do have some "upgrade" options where the installer runs silently in the background in my case it was enough to make a simple task that is set to run once a month and the instructions I gave haven't caused confusion yet: "Once a month this small thing appears, just let it do its thing and click Close when it is done"

Just make sure you enter these applications and disable the update notification settings so you avoid the phone calls you can't do anything about.

Does this still work for Flash?

Ah! I see they've removed flash from the list recently. I did not experience any errors previously on either win7 or win8 when they still had it.

I think it's the result of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5637453

I'd consider setting up crashplan or some other automatic cloud backup pretty important, unless the grandma only uses it as a web browser (in which case I'd go ChromeOS)

"Make fonts bigger in Safari. I set her up with Safari just because it's bundled with the OS and is the most straightforward, although surely Firefox and Chrome have similar options."

Being not so young anymore, I also like to set my browsers (Chrome and Firefox) to use bigger default fonts. But I find it amazing how many web sites out there have their layouts completely screwed up unless you use the default font size. When this happens, I have to hit ctrl-minus a few times for the site to look readable again. I've seen this kind of breakage on the web sites of major newspapers and other big businesses.

I'd add turning on screen sharing and setting up a dynamic DNS client so it's easy to get on and help.

I was going to say the same thing. Allow screen sharing for his user so that he can easily jump in and do updates or fix problems.

I'd also add in disabling all the function key buttons, especially Dashboard since the author was correct in assuming that any button/gesture that changes the screen you are looking at will only lead to mass confusion.

Oh, and lock the dock so that they can't easily move, remove, or add new things to the dock.

Another thing could be to lock the dock - my grandmother occasionally accidentally drags icons off the dock, resulting in her calling me because the Internet has disappeared.

Ooh, good one to look out for -- thanks!

    Don't forget to buy her a good and "ergonomic chair" too.

A) Install one of the "many" ChromeOS alternatives, see: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/12/30/10-free-fast-bo...

B) Get a Tablet. iPad or Android, it really really doesn't matter!

UI changes are negligible when the UX is much more intuitive, accessible and better. Most Tablets are filled with crapware and have ugly default settings like tiny font-size, too many app-icons. It is entirely clear that touchscreens are more intuitive, when the UI and UX is optimized to do as much as possible for you with only minimal and intuitive input.

If your grandma is "smarter" and needs the "Computer" to work with Office, then you better get her a Notebook. Again Brand doesn't matter. Make sure the screen is large enough and that buttons have background illumination. If your Grandma is weak, buy her a PC not a Notebook, so she doesn't has to grab that heavy thing up and down.

Tip: With respect to web accessibility, Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into Accessibility" [1] is still a great primer, even more than a decade after he wrote it. While the underlying technologies have changed quite a bit, it remains a good introduction to the basic principles and why they matter.

[1] http://diveintoaccessibility.info/

Something I've noticed is a sticking point with some less experienced computer users is file system navigation, specifically being able to consistently locate files (e.g. for web uploads).

It's something I've considered attempting to solve myself, but no super intuitive and clean solutions come to mind. Has anyone else run into this issue, either with friends or family?

iOS solves this admirably by simply forcing you store a given document type within the relevant app, then having only one such app.

More technically minded folk hate this but for less powerful users it is wonderful. Wtf do I need a file system browser with a bunch of .epub files in it if I can simply have iBooks?

When I set up a computer for my grandpa to read email from the family (white list heavy) and browse some newspapers from his home country (bookmarked only the ones that worked without javascript) i used linux with windowmaker. pretty much the same as a mac Dock. huge buttons always visible on the screen.

the shock came when you give him a mouse and say to click at that big link and he just raise the mouse to the screen and looks at you like "what now?". maybe i should have started with the Wii, if it wasn't some 15yrs too early.

I tried very hard to predict every point where they would need 'specialized knowledge' about computers and preemptively worked around it somehow. but after a while, it proved better to gave em hell (i.e. not try to shield them) and just be easy to reach for questions (and re-image)

While Apple, Microsoft and Google and anyone else who makes stuff for the internet aren't necessarily to blame for this, they could go a long way in making it easier for older people to use Computer's for this. The demographic for 70/80/90+ people using PCs must be relatively small compared to the rest of the market and is surely decreasing all the time with the onset of tablets.

Maybe it would be helpful if Apple/Microsoft/Google could increase the Accessibility options and maybe add some sort of option to disable all the stuff and more that Talos mentions and automatically have the Computer set up an "Accessibility account" for those in such a situation.

Great post, really made me think about our attitude to accessibility on the web and how robust we have to be in building Apps and websites.

I'm not sure how hard it would be, but I wonder if you could turn these suggestions into a script. I'm sure a lot of people would pay $10 (just throwing out a price point) for an app that allows you to quickly setup a computer for an extremely non-technical user.

Well, if it comes to Flash updates, you might prefer Chrome which seamlessly upgrades itself and the used Flash package in the background. On the downside, slight UI changes might happen with new Chrome versions.

Also Linux is still an option. It could be configured for all the needs (contrast, font size, clean UI, autologin, ...) and has some additional administrative features like automatically upgrades in the background (including Flash, if Ubuntu is still providing that meta package) and every configuration could is also openly reflected in the file system which might help doing remote support and backups. Also it might prevent the usual Windows/Mac malware downloads.

>turn off 2 finger scrolling

This is insane advice.

10.4 and PPC-based Macs can still be useful (I use my 12" PowerBook every day). Get MacTubes to watch YouTube, as a benefit you don't see most of the ads.

TenFourFox as you noted, or OmniWeb for the browser. Install a script blocker (NoScript for TenFourFox, or use site-specific Preferences in OmniWeb). Use a hosts file to blocking most ad sites. This makes most websites a lot faster.

Maybe this is not practical for "grandma" but it lets me keep using my otherwise bulletproof (knock on wood) PowerBook.

With respect to requiring Flash on YouTube, have you checked out YouTube5[1]? I've found that I can use most of the web without Flash using this extension (of course, it depends which websites your grandma uses...)

[1] http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/

I think it's very sad that, considering how far we've come, computers -- I include phones, etc. -- still support older users very poorly out-of-the-box.

In particular, it is ridiculous that this is still a good idea (especially considering it's an Apple machine):

> Make everything bigger. ... I cut her resolution from 1440 by 900 to 1024 by 640.

Just found this solution for YouTube: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vlc-for-youtube/ab...

About to try it out, so can't say how good it is yet.

> The fad for hiding controls when you're not using them > (looking at you, scroll bars)

Set System Preferences > General > Show Scroll Bars > Always!

I like to enable SSH on my parent's laptop, so if they phone up and ask for help with something, usually I can SSH in and fix it remotely.

This reads like an ad form ChromeBooks. ;-) Seriously, though, was that (or an iPad) an option?

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