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I don't get it. I thought the main selling point of an iPad is that it's even easier than a Mac. I mean, how much easier could a tablet be?

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A lot. My parents and I recently bought my 93 yo Grandfather an iPad, and even though he's smart and has owned a desktop mac for 15 years he still struggles with things like email and photos on the iPad. Senior-oriented features/ui, and maybe family remote control help, would be neat. It's also possible that 93 is just too old for some people to learn new technology.

Tangentially relevant: watching a nontechnical senior citizen use an app I worked on was a humbling experience. Things that seemed obvious to me were disorienting and discouraging, even after patient explanation that could never be offered in production.

The problem is that to simplify an interface further after a certain point, you need to remove features. But the features you remove will be inessential to some people but absolutely essential to others. Even if you've reduced your target market to "the elderly who want to use email to send and receive pictures", you've still got a huge pile of features that you'll never reduce far enough to make it simple for everyone.

It seems like most of the problems you mention could be solved by just having apps with a more friendly UI as opposed to manufacturing a new device.

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