My grandma also mostly plays games and checks her email/Facebook, but she also occasionally has to search the web and has used Siri on her iPad, I don't think Cortana would be that big of a stretch to get her into (e.g. I've seen her use Siri semi-regularly to check the local weather).
To be frank, she would likely be better off with a Chromebook. But unfortunately she has a few games she plays which are Windows binaries (e.g. those $5 CDs containing "2500 card games").
Cortana is no more or no less accessible than Siri.
Or she doesn't care about computers and just wants to call her friends via Skype in a pandemic. Why would she care about becoming a better computer user?
Yes, your type of grandma exists, but I don't know her.
My grandma uses it for Internet shopping, email via Mail app, and banking via an app. She no longer has a computer. The security model is much better for her.
Frankly your "grandmother" is better off not doing this anyway.
She needs the anti-phishing filter, the anti-malicious app & URL filter, and will want useful features like Cortana, predictive search, page compatibility modes, allowing websites/apps to ask for her location (e.g. Google Maps), and her files to be backed up when her computer fails.
You can argue if certain things help your "grandmother" (e.g. telemetry, advertiser IDs, etc) but this seems like to throws the baby out with the bathwater.
PS - Windows 10's defaults could be better. But this takes it to the other extreme, disabling legitimately useful functionality (in particular security focused functionality).
My granny will get a new PC next week, that will be capable of doing all the fancy stuff, movies, music,... So far she has only been emailing and doing some surfing and online banking (her old computer had 32MB of RAM - ouch!).
Any advice for other nice things to show her? Google Earth is a nobrainer, and I will show her YouTube. Other than that? I myself only visit three sites regularly in my daily surfing: news.yc, a friend's community page and a "normal" news page, so I don't have that many ideas for getting entertained on the internet.
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)
There are two problems with this: Both these types of users can't co-exist on the same device type or ecosystem. Grandma might not invent the next internet on an iPad but your kid is also never going to get that opportunity.
And secondly, since you can't install the next internet on the iPad, Grandma is never going to get to use it.
Google, Amazon, and Facebook all make devices that do exactly this. A big screen that sits on a side table, essentially a digital photo frame, that you can dial into. In the Amazon Echo case, you can even “Drop In” and connect with no need for grandma to even accept.
My grandmother has an Ipad and an IPhone. We sometimes video call her on here phone using whatsapp. But this works around 50% of the time correctly and the other times we just call using a regular land line phone. She uses the Ipad only as a image viewer. We showed her multiple times how to google something but that is just to difficult for her. But she understands how to watch the photo's we put on the device, and she really likes to watch the old photo's of all our vacations together. So my recommendation would be use something that your grandmother is already comfortable with and start thinking from there. Introducing something new can be hard for her even if it is simpeler.
I think this varies. I'm not a grandparent, but am close to 50 years old and have been working in computer technology my entire adult life. I have an Android smartphone (got my first one this year) but have not installed any apps on it. Email, web browser, text messages, calendar, contacts, and maps are all there and I can't really think of anything else useful I'd want it to do.
My mother-in-law on the other hand IS a grandmother and she's constantly using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and half a dozen other things on her phone. I don't see the point in any of it and don't use any of those things.
"I'm pretty sure my grandmother is never going to understand that when the Internet in her house goes out she'll need to reboot her router before she can save a document"
Good thing that's not how it will work.
"I can think of no one in my life who I'd buy this for and I'm sure most of us are in the same boat."
I'd buy it for my grandmother. Well, I might choose an IPad over this, but one of these is the best choice for her.
To be frank, she would likely be better off with a Chromebook. But unfortunately she has a few games she plays which are Windows binaries (e.g. those $5 CDs containing "2500 card games").
Cortana is no more or no less accessible than Siri.
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