How does he do with the mouse? From my experience, people over a certain age just never quite get the mouse. Touch screens are the ideal solution, touch pads would be fine except the ones on laptops are too small, and trackballs are a whole lot better than mice because they let you seperate the action of clicking and moving... too often I see older computer users accidentally moving the pointer when they want to click.

He understands and uses the mouse; his problem with that is not the concept, but tremor. The first mouse he ever used at home was a trackball, but he hasn't had much problem switching to the scroll-ball mouse that came with his Mac Mini.

On Windows, he never seemed to get the difference between situations calling for left click and those calling for right click, so the single-button mouse was a relief.

Touch screens can be good for a lot of things but a desktop just isn't one of them unless the monitor is laid flat on the desk. Having to reach out your arm to the monitor constantly is not comfortable.

That's true. The ergonomics of a laptop touch screen/tablet PC are better.

I agree. I built my grandparents a computer from scraps and it ran swimmingly, but they never could manage the mouse and the home country just doesn't look the same on a cathode ray tube. They were politely disinterested.

Someone modded most of the posts down in this thread, which is just odd. Ideological disagreement about the ease of use of OS X?