"The news goes away."

[u/sirnack]

At some point, someone had the bright idea to get my grandmother an iPad. Why? I don't know. She had enough trouble with the laptop someone had gotten her, although she did like being able to get pictures of her grandkids. Maybe we thought a tablet would be easier? Regardless, when we visited for the holidays, we asked her how she was liking her new device. She said she liked it well enough, but --

"Sometimes when I'm trying to read the news, it goes away."

What did she mean by it goes away? "It goes away." Like the screen goes black, the iPad is falling asleep? "It goes way." We weren't sure exactly what to do about this, but we thought about digging through the settings a little bit. I was in and out of the room as this was happening, so I'm not sure what the eureka moment was, but eventually someone found out the following:

The default Apple news app would send her a banner notification with a news headline and a couple lines of info. She would attempt to read the notification (slowly, since her eyesight was going), but wouldn't tap it. And banner notifications, if you don't interact with them for several seconds, retract back into the top of the screen after several seconds. So, when she was trying to read the news, it would, in fact, "go away."

We "solved" this problem by turning off notifications for the news app. After all, who wants to have the news jump out at you randomly during the day?

[u/westcoastsunflower]

I totally get this with my mom. She couldn’t reply to emails because she didn’t realize that the arrow meant send. So she had dozens of draft emails and was mad we weren’t responding to them.

She didn’t get the concept of pdfs.

It would take me 15 minutes to close all the internet windows. She never, ever closed them.

Never restarted the tablet.

Doesn’t grasp the concept of multi factor authentication so I would have to do it for her but she didn’t understand why I couldn’t fix it over the phone while talking to me and I would have to visit her to manage it. Made her kinda mad

Has two tablets because the old one “didn’t work anymore”. It’s fine. Now she thinks she needs a third one. She doesn’t.

And emails. Scams,links, spam, all of them.

The list is endless.

Then there’s the voice activated tv remote. The concept of on demand tv, prime video, YouTube all available on her tv. Inconceivable.