Gifts for parents who aren't tech-savvy: a short list from someone who's been the family tech-support person
The best tech gifts for parents who aren't tech-savvy are ones that come with printed instructions and a real person on email. A printed setup binder for one specific tool — like a ChatGPT setup binder — gets used because there is no app to download and no video to pause.
My father is seventy-eight. He worked thirty-six years at a job that involved a clipboard, a tape measure, and a two-way radio, and he was excellent at it. He is not, by any reasonable definition, bad at technology. He is, however, the person I have spent the most cumulative hours of my adult life on the phone with about technology — usually because someone in our family bought him a thing, the thing arrived in a box with a QR code instead of instructions, and the giver assumed the rest would work itself out. It rarely does.
If you are between forty-five and sixty and you are reading this in November, you are probably looking for a holiday gift for a parent like him. Or for a mother who would rather write a check than open a chat window. You want the gift to get used. You do not want to spend Christmas Day on FaceTime walking her through a settings menu. You especially do not want to be the reason she ends a perfectly nice morning saying I just don't get any of this.
What follows is the list I wish someone had handed me before the third or fourth round of gifts that ended up unopened in a drawer.
The rule for buying tech gifts for a parent who hates tech
There is exactly one rule, and every other recommendation on this page is a corollary of it.
The gift has to be a single object that does a single thing, and the instructions for it have to be on paper.
Every part of that sentence is doing work. Single object: not an ecosystem of three devices that talk to each other through an app. Single thing: not a Swiss-army gadget that does email and calendars and music and home security. Instructions on paper: not a QR code that opens a video that has its own pre-roll ad before the actual instructions begin.
The reason this rule exists is that the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking technology adoption among older Americans for more than a decade, has consistently found a persistent gap in confidence, not capability. Most people 65 and older own a smartphone — 76 percent, in Pew's most recent figures. What they don't have is the assumption, built up over twenty years of daily use, that the right next button is somewhere on the screen and that tapping things you don't understand is generally safe. That assumption is what makes a forty-year-old able to set up a new app in two minutes. Without it, the same five-step setup feels like driving a rental car in a foreign country at night.
Paper instructions don't time out. They don't get hidden behind a software update. They can be circled with a pen and left next to the device. That is the entire trick.
Five gifts that actually get used
1. A printed setup binder for one specific software tool. This is the gift I make. It is also the category I have watched outperform every other tech gift in our family for two consecutive holiday seasons. The version we sell is a printed, spiral-bound binder for ChatGPT — about thirty pages, plain English, written at a sixth-grade reading level — for $19. The reason it gets used is not because the binder is brilliant. It is because the gift is one specific tool, one set of steps, on paper that lives next to the computer. Any setup binder that meets those three criteria will outperform any unboxed gadget. If the parent in your life already has a Kindle and you've been told they "use it sometimes," a printed binder for the Kindle's library-loan feature would be better than another Kindle. The category is the gift, not the company.
2. A label maker. This sounds like a joke and it is not. A Brother P-touch label maker — about $25 at a hardware store — has solved more daily friction in my parents' house than any piece of consumer electronics in the last decade. They label the remote controls. They label the phone chargers so the iPhone cable and the Android cable don't get mixed up. They label the surge protector so my father knows which plug runs the lamp. Once labeled, none of these things is technology anymore. It is just a labeled object. That is the goal.
3. A simple digital photo frame, pre-loaded. Not a smart frame that requires an app. Not a frame the recipient has to set up over Wi-Fi by typing a password using a directional pad. A simple frame, with a USB stick already inserted, already containing about forty photos you copied onto it yourself. The AARP 2024 holiday gift guide singled this category out for the same reason: the setup is done before the box is opened. A frame that arrives ready to plug in and turn on is a different gift than a frame that arrives with a setup process. They look identical in the store. They are not the same product.
4. A landline phone with large buttons and a printed list of family numbers taped to the base. The thing about a landline is that it works during a power outage, it does not need to be charged, and it does not need to be updated. The Consumer Reports tech-for-grandparents round-up has recommended large-button corded phones for several years running, and the reason is straightforward: redundancy is comforting. The cell phone can sit on the counter. The landline is the backup that doesn't ask anything of anybody.
5. A subscription to a single magazine they used to read. This is the wildcard on the list, and it is here because it solves a problem most tech gifts make worse — the problem that a screen is now between the parent and almost every form of information they used to enjoy. Smithsonian, The Atlantic, Reader's Digest, Field & Stream, Garden & Gun — pick the one that maps to who they actually are, not who you wish they would become. Twelve months of a magazine arriving in the mailbox is, structurally, a gift that requires zero technical setup, prompts a phone call when they read something good, and lives on the coffee table where a tablet would just collect fingerprints.
Five gifts to skip
1. A new smartphone they didn't ask for. Switching phones — even within the same operating system — moves every icon, hides every contact behind a slightly different menu, and resets the muscle memory of an eighty-year-old hand. If the current phone works and they know where the call button is, leave it alone. The Pew gap I mentioned earlier is not about hardware. It is about familiarity. New hardware destroys familiarity, which is the most valuable thing they have.
2. A smart speaker (Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomePod). The pitch is that they can ask it questions out loud. The reality is that the device requires Wi-Fi credentials, an app on a phone you will end up configuring, and a recurring software update cycle that occasionally changes the wake word or the supported skills. Worse, the AARP fraud-watch division has been tracking a rise in voice-cloning scams targeting older adults, and a household with an always-on listening device adds a new attack surface for a population that is already a heavy scam target. The upside is small, the setup cost is real, and the downside is not zero.
3. A subscription to a streaming service they don't already use. Disney+, Paramount+, Apple TV+, Peacock — every streaming service is a separate app, a separate login, a separate remote-control input, and a separate password to forget. If they already use Netflix and they like it, gift another year of Netflix. Adding a second streaming service is not a gift. It is a project.
4. A "starter kit" of anything. "Smart home starter kit." "Photography starter kit." "Coding starter kit for adults." Every starter kit is implicitly a promise that the recipient will become a beginner at a new hobby, which is a promise that almost no one — at any age — actually wants to be held to. If the parent in your life has shown specific, sustained interest in photography, gift a single nice camera with a printed quick-start card. Do not gift a kit. Kits are gifts for the giver.
5. A tablet "to replace the laptop." The tablet will not replace the laptop. The tablet will sit next to the laptop, and at some point one of them will need to be updated, and you will be the person they call. If they like the laptop, the laptop is the right machine. If the laptop is broken, replace the laptop. Tablets are a great gift for grandchildren and a confusing gift for grandparents, and the reason is the same in both cases: a tablet is a category for people who already own three other devices and want a fourth.
What I would actually buy this year
If I had a hundred dollars and a parent like my dad to buy for, I would spend it like this: $19 on a printed setup binder for one specific tool they have either already signed up for or expressed curiosity about. $25 on a Brother P-touch label maker, plus a pack of replacement label tape so they don't run out the first week. $30 on a year's subscription to one magazine they used to read in their thirties. $25 left over for a card. I would write the card by hand. I would put the receipt for the binder in the card so they can call the maker if anything goes wrong, instead of calling me at ten on a Sunday night.
That is the actual gift. The objects are the props. The gift is I bought you something you can use without my help, which is, for a parent in their seventies, a different thing entirely than a parent in their forties wants for Christmas. It is, in a way, an apology in advance for the next time the Wi-Fi goes out and they have to call me anyway. We both know it is coming. The binder is the part that says but not for this.
If the parent in your life has shown any curiosity about ChatGPT — even at the level of "I keep hearing about this thing" — the binder we make is at $19 on the pricing page, and a one-page free version of the first-day plan is at the start link. If you'd rather read the next piece in this series first — which is the one about how to actually sit down with him and walk through it without it turning into a phone fight — I wrote that one too.
— Shawn Ivie Founder, Plain English Company