This is the kind of stuff I do for my parents (early 70s):
- They both have the same phone: iPhone 13, so we all have a shared context for how phones work.
- Maintain Google Family/iCloud family subscriptions so they don't worry about storage or losing data. I do yearly in-person hard backups of their computers and phones (mostly photos).
- Create them synthetic iCloud accounts with email addresses that are just aliases for my email.
- Password managers + adblocking on everything. They don't know how to create passwords really but at least it autofills easily.
- They use Eero router and I am the admin - so I can remotely check network status, restart it, etc (this is REALLY nifty - "internet is messed up" questions dropped 100% when I switched this over from a NetGear router).
- Similarly, I set their router to NextDNS and block ads + threats for them.
I couldn’t quickly find what ‘synthetic iCloud account’ is, what do you mean by that? From the context it’s not very clear the difference with the regular iCloud account.
Sorry, using the word synthetic made it sound more technical than it really is. It's a regular iCloud account. I just said "synthetic" to get across the point that the account is basically meaningless to them, they don't even know they have it, and it's confusing to even bring it up with them. The fact that the username is an email address, but it's not actually how they access that email, would lead to
questions/issues for me personally. So I just set up single-purpose aliases in fastmail and own the accounts fully.
- They both have the same phone: iPhone 13, so we all have a shared context for how phones work.
- Maintain Google Family/iCloud family subscriptions so they don't worry about storage or losing data. I do yearly in-person hard backups of their computers and phones (mostly photos).
- Create them synthetic iCloud accounts with email addresses that are just aliases for my email.
- Password managers + adblocking on everything. They don't know how to create passwords really but at least it autofills easily.
- They use Eero router and I am the admin - so I can remotely check network status, restart it, etc (this is REALLY nifty - "internet is messed up" questions dropped 100% when I switched this over from a NetGear router).
- Similarly, I set their router to NextDNS and block ads + threats for them.