Parents: Do your children enjoy using PPC Macs?

[mectojic]

I'm not a father yet, though I hope to be one day. But something that I have often wondered about is whether I would encourage my future children to play with retro tech as they grow up.

Call me nostalgic, but one thing I know is that I will never give my children an iPhone 18... nor do I really want them to have a modern gaming console. The realism present in modern games feels so soulless, and I feel that too much realism deprives your own creativity and imagination in the first place...

So to those who are parents and still use PPC Macs – do you let your children play on them? Do they like typing on old chunky keyboards and looking at CRTs or old TFTs with visible pixels and playing retro games?

 

[eyoungren]

I can tell you my journey - at least as it relates to my son anyway.

He was born in 2003. I've got a pic of him in his bouncer holding a PC keyboard. One of his toys as a toddler, although my wife had me cut the cord short. At 3 he was sitting with me when I was working on a 6500 that @bunnspecial now owns.

For a while we had a crap PC that I loaded up with games I got at the Goodwill (that's a good, inexpensive resource). When he turned five I gave him his own iBook. It was a low end G3 with a bad Airport antenna. The point was to teach him respect for his stuff.

Until he was about 14 or so we regularly hit up Starbucks and other coffee shops with our Macs. I'd run an ethernet cable from my PowerMac to his iBook and start Internet Sharing for him. Mostly the sites he went to were Nick Jr and such. Lots of online games for kids.

At some point I got him his own TiBook 1Ghz. I had to replace the screen though. Cost me $25. A 802.11n PC WiFi card was purchased for him because the original Airport Card in that Mac could no longer connect to Starbucks network. The Ti-Book was later replaced with a 15" PowerBook that had a bad ram slot.

After one particular incident with a next door 'friend' and snapping off a key from his iBook, my son started taking seriously the care of his tech devices.

Ultimately, this all won my son a brand new iPhone SE in 2017. I replaced that with a brand new iPhone SE 2020 a few months ago. He takes care of his stuff and I've never bought my kids any of the latest or greatest. My wife an I have a rule - the kids don't get better stuff than what we personally use, unless they pay for the extra themselves.

Both my kids only got phones when things developed that we had people in the house going in three directions. Kids to school, wife to school, me to work. We needed to be able to get a hold of the kids. My son was no older than 13 when he got his first phone, a iPhone 4s 8GB I paid $20 for. He was limited to a 2GB line and because of the 4s, 3G data.

My daughter was a bit younger, but it was an iPhone 5 she got, 2GB line and limited to HSPA+.

Let's just say my daughter is still stuck on an iPhone 6s because she hasn't learned the same lessons her brother has.

Anyway, lots of stuff out there. For baby's/toddlers you might look into AlphaBaby. It's an app that locks out everything while running (special keyboard command to escape). It shows on screen whatever key is pressed and says that key out loud. My son and daughter had a few rounds of that when they were that young.

 

[AphoticD]

My two sons are presently both 8 and have an iBook G4 14" each for educational games like The Incredible Machines and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing series, as well as the occasional LAN game of Tony Hawk 4 or Star Wars Battlefront.

They've gone through a couple of laptops which didn't survive in their hands (a first-gen Intel MacBook and a HP notebook). I picked up the iBooks in a bundle a few years back for about $20 each and they are pretty much indestructible.

I've kept up their interest in 8-bit and 16-bit gaming with a SNES Classic hooked up to the family TV (+ Hakchi installed for retroarch NES, Genesis, some N64). We've gone through many hours of Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart, Donkey Kong, Sonic the Hedgehog, Legend of Zelda, Street Fighter II, etc etc.

The newest console we have in the house is an Xbox 360 E-series (my eldest son's birthday gift last year). I've been buying him the occasional pre-owned 360 game for about $5 to $10 on the 'bay.

Minecraft on the 360 and PC is still hugely popular with them. They are playing MC on the Win10 (c. 2011) HTPC right now, while I am typing this on my go-to PBG4 12" from '05.

My original iPad (1st gen which I've owned since launch day) and an iPad 2 (freebie) have been popular with them. But the old iPads are difficult to find software for (other than what I had saved to HDD back when iTunes would store .ipa files).

On a side-note, the biggest tech-related challenge as a parent is YouTube... It's hard to get them to focus on ANYTHING when the highly addictive, popular YT channels have their attention. I'm currently using the free OpenDNS service on my home network to block unwanted content and toggle access to YT to limit their usage.

 

[Macbookprodude]

These are very heart-warming stories. I got my son, when he was 12 a Pb G4 2006 15 inch DLSD and he played games through flash on it and browsed the internet on it. Later, he played some Star Wars games on it. He is 22 now and still uses it for nostalgic reasons, as he loves older tech while he bought himself an iPhone XR. His original iPhone was a 6 plus, before that iPhone 5.. his 1st ever iPhone was a 3GS when he was 9 years old.