Comment by jordn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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 :)

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

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.

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