Apple’s new parental controls are having a messy roll out ↦

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, writing at The Verge, illuminates some challenges with the new parental controls Apple added in this year’s software updates: I’m not even trying to use Screen Time on my son’s devices. He’s 18, away at college, and well beyond my parental controls. The problem is I apparently need him to update his MacBook Neo before I can use Apple’s new Screen Time features on my 15-year-old daughter’s iPhone. His college is four hours away, and like many college kids, he’s an expert at ignoring text messages from his mom asking him to do a boring chore. The underlying issue here is a technical one: there’s a new architecture on which the entire system is based, not unlike when Apple updated its home architecture a couple of years ago. So you end up with kind of an all-or-nothing approach here. My hurdle with the new parental controls is that the iPad my kid uses is an old one—a hand-me-down 2017 iPad Pro that can’t even be updated to iOS 27. That, unsurprisingly, makes the new parental controls a non-starter. The likely answer? Buy a new iPad. But the kid is four and currently only uses the iPad for watching videos on long trips, so that seems like overkill. It also means there isn’t really a deep need for parental controls, since we’re still in a world where the iPad is never used on the internet and without some degree of supervision—it can still just be removed. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only issue Pattison Tuohy ran into; other devices didn’t register as updated, ghost devices lingered, and the new controls took time to roll out even after the updates. While these issues will likely get ironed out in time, it does seem like a bumpy launch for a much-touted new feature.