So, if I understand you correctly, Apple should decide what constitutes good parenting?
More fine-grained parental controls would certainly be nice. But what exactly is your hypothesis here? Apple wants to force parents to submit to their ideas of parenting through their design of the parental controls feature on the iPhone? That seems like a pretty stupid hypothesis to me.
It’s not that the parental controls feature is unworthy of discussion. I don’t think it’s particularly well designed. It just seems so completely absurd and ridiculous to claim that bad design must imply that Apple doesn’t want teenagers to surf the web. I’m utterly confused as to how a story like this can get more than forty upvotes on HN.
You can download this app no matter how old you are. It will show a warning dialog but you can just dismiss that and download anyway.
This age limit only matters if parental controls are enabled. You can then pick which apps can be used, based on their age limit (all of them, only 17+, …). Some OS apps like Safari get extra switches – you can explicitly decide whether Safari and a few other things can be used or not.
Age limits are not always the best solution, though (what some parents deem appropriate, others do not). That’s why I think the parental controls are badly designed. Ideally you would get a switch for every app, so that you can override the age based defaults. Such a list would still be pretty horrible from a UI point of view – all your apps replicated in one unstructured list – that’s probably why Apple doesn’t do it. Or maybe they just had no time to implement that feature, yet. Either way, it’s no big deal.
How would you rate a browser, know that you know how the iPhone’s parental controls work? You can access content with it that a vast majority of parents would consider 17+.
(By the way, how do parental controls work on Android? I’m really curious!)
> This age limit only matters if parental controls are enabled. You can then pick which apps can be used, based on their age limit (all of them, only 17+, …). Some OS apps like Safari get extra switches – you can explicitly decide whether Safari and a few other things can be used or not.
Thanks I know how it works, no matter how you put it, limiting browsing the net to +17 year old is ridiculous and actually bad, the internet is the greatest resource for students.
> By the way, how do parental controls work on Android? I’m really curious!
There is none, and that's the way it should be, parental control should be done by... parents, not Steve Jobs. If you have porn addictions like this guy you can still remove the browser, youtube and marketplace apps though: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market/thread?...
Edit: parental control is password protected on the iPhone, but it can be undone by a reset of the phone, which any kid can do, so it's pretty useless anyway.
More fine-grained parental controls would certainly be nice. But what exactly is your hypothesis here? Apple wants to force parents to submit to their ideas of parenting through their design of the parental controls feature on the iPhone? That seems like a pretty stupid hypothesis to me.
It’s not that the parental controls feature is unworthy of discussion. I don’t think it’s particularly well designed. It just seems so completely absurd and ridiculous to claim that bad design must imply that Apple doesn’t want teenagers to surf the web. I’m utterly confused as to how a story like this can get more than forty upvotes on HN.