We even have a friend who wants to adopt it. The 2010 MacBook Air was easy: I booted into macOS Recovery, reformatted the SSD, and reinstalled macOS. Given the age of these machines, that’s proving more difficult than I anticipated. It was my job to erase the drives and get rid of the machines. You never know if you might need the old one for something, and regardless of whether the machine has value to anyone, it’s important to erase the internal drive before disposing of it. None were in use, but they’d been kept instead of recycled in part because it’s hard to decommission an old computer soon after getting a new one. (Sticky notes were everywhere, in fact, since they’re excellent reminders, and JP has long fit the mold of the absent-minded professor.) They also had an old MacBook Air, Mac mini, iMac, Dell PC tower, and PC subnotebook, all of which were weighing on them. On my first visit, JP and Gretel had a box of random tech bits-keyboards, mice, USB hubs, power supplies-labeled with my name on a sticky note. Some level of change is inevitable, but everything gets harder when that change has been delayed for years. Some apps really do break purely from age (like 32-bit apps in macOS 10.15 Catalina), some updates require new minimum hardware and operating systems, and compelling capabilities appear in new and revised apps. But in the tech world, staying put often isn’t feasible. It’s tempting to fall back on that old saw, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and sometimes that’s true. Plus, those who have been using technology for decades tend to have a lot of older hardware around, further complicating upgrade and compatibility questions. It’s not that the systems are necessarily too hard (though some could improve) it’s that there is too much to learn and it changes too frequently. But from what I’ve observed among the mainstream public, it’s increasingly common for the elderly to rely heavily on computers, tablets, and smartphones but have trouble with the constant change in the tech world. I don’t want to make overgeneralizations about people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, since we have many highly technical and capable TidBITS readers in those age ranges (not to mention our centenarian-see “ George Jedenoff: A 101-Year-Old TidBITS Reader,” 17 June 2019 and “ 102-Year-Old George Jedenoff Publishes His Autobiography,” 26 August 2019). In each case, I was struck by the fact that Apple has put some effort into addressing these problems recently, but in ways that won’t necessarily help older Mac users who aren’t using the latest hardware, operating systems, and technologies. We had time for only a few visits before they were slated to leave, and their house was being packed up around us, so they had three areas to focus on: dealing with old hardware, rationalizing their backup strategy, and coming up with a better password management system. I’d go over, decipher the notes he left himself by naming empty folders on his Mac Plus, and help him work through various software and hardware problems. I knew what I was getting into, more or less, since JP was one of my first consulting clients in 1987 when I was a junior at Cornell and he lived just a block away. I had promised Oliver that I’d stand in for him as necessary, and since he had been JP and Gretel’s primary tech support person for years, I was happy to help when they said they had some computer questions. They’re internationally renowned scientists in nutritional epidemiology and nutritional anthropology, and while they’re both suffering the seemingly inevitable physical ravages of age, they remain fully mentally competent, if occasionally slowed by medications and fatigue. Over the last few weeks, I’ve spent some time helping my late friend Oliver’s elderly father JP and his wife Gretel, who are preparing for a move to an assisted-living apartment in another state (see “ Oliver Habicht Dies of Pancreatic Cancer at 53,” 26 September 2020). Helping Senior Citizens Reveals Past Apple Lapses and Recent Improvements #1686: Please support TidBITS, OS security updates, Apple services poll results, biking with an iPhone.#1687: Feature-rich OS updates, recovering from a crashing bug in Contacts, Zoom for Apple TV, how much do you use widgets?.#1688: Former Apple engineer on watchOS 10, Apple hardware testing tool, Stolen Device Protection, Apple Watch sales halted, smart TV privacy abuses.#1689: Vision Pro ship date, evaluating new Apple device features, minor OS updates, iPhone passcode thief, Time Machine and iCloud Drive.#1690: BBEdit 15 adds ChatGPT, OS widget usage poll results, Magic Keyboard firmware update.
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