What’s Been on Your Mind in a Year of Tech?

Questions ran the gamut, from digital storage to settings on a smart TV

Edward C. Baig,

AARP

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Published December 30, 2025

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AARP (Getty Images, 10)

AARP members and readers are invited to submit pressing technology questions they’d like me to tackle in my Tech Guru column, including issues around devices, security, social media and how all the puzzle pieces fit together.

At the one-year mark of this column this past July, I insisted that older adults are often smarter about tech than people give them credit for, and my mind hasn’t changed since. Think about it: Many folks in their 50s, 60s and even 70s have used computers on the job and at home for years, just like their younger counterparts. The same goes for the tech that came later: certainly smartphones, but also tablets, e-readers and a variety of “smart” products under the rubric collectively known as the Internet of Things (IoT), which include smart TVs, smart speakers and appliances.

To add perspective, today’s 70-year-old person was half that age in 1990, when Microsoft unleashed Windows 3.0, a visually appealing (for the time) string of PCs that users could control with a mouse. This ushered in many people’s first experience with having a computer at home.

But, as I also wrote six months ago, if all these products are so smart, why do they confuse so many people, and why are older adults expected to be fluent in the language of the tech industry when it should be the other way around?

In 2025, the tech world’s attention was squarely focused on generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence that enables people to obtain answers and generate images and videos by simply prompting the AI. We will continue to hear much more about AI in the new year.

But most of the Tech Guru questions AARP addressed focused not on AI but on practical user concerns and how to handle certain tasks, from navigating settings on a smart TV to wiping devices clean before giving them away.

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The following nine columns addressed these and other issues.

How Can I Stop Advertisers From Tracking Me Online? Privacy is always top of mind for older adults, and that certainly applies to the approach we take while shopping, surfing and conducting business in cyberspace. Privacy-focused web browsers, VPNs and the anti-tracking settings built into Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome help you maintain as much privacy as possible.

How and Why You Should Delete Your Old Text Messages. Speaking of privacy, or at least embarrassing situations, how often have you wanted to yank back texts you sent either accidentally or before considering the consequences? The good news is you can make some of those texts disappear before they are read. The bad: You must act with haste. Of course, you can also jettison texts to free up space on your devices, even if they’re not particularly embarrassing.

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How Do I Tailor Subtitles and Captions on My TV? As many of us age, we don’t see or hear as well as we used to. Fortunately, as you watch favorite shows and movies on smart TVs and via Netflix, Amazon Prime or other streaming services, you can tailor the fonts, text size and backgrounds to make out the words on the screen more easily.

Settings Can Improve How You Watch Your Smart TV. On the subject of television, I recommended digging into the settings to discover many other ways to bolster your viewing experience, from adjusting the brightness and sound to controlling the data your TV manufacturer may collect and share about the stuff you watch, which may influence the sponsored ads you see on the home screen.

Read a Transcript as Someone Is Leaving a Voicemail. Whether you know who it is who’s calling or the person is a complete stranger, you’d like to know the purpose of the call before answering. If the caller is a friend but it’s not a convenient time to pick up, you might want to know if the call is urgent. And suffice to say, if it’s a marketer or potential scammer, you want to know that, too. This column discussed voicemail tools from Apple and Google that let you prescreen calls on iPhones and Pixels.

Smartphone Safety Checks Provide Peace of Mind. We all want to know our loved ones are safe and, in turn, let family and friends know we’re just fine, too. Check-in tools on smartphones can help you confirm that those who are dear to you are indeed OK. You may not even have to utter the familiar line, “Call or text me when you get there.”

Recover Lost Apple or Google Account Passwords. It’s a nightmare scenario: You’ve forgotten your password and are locked out of your Apple or Google accounts, meaning you cannot access email, media and other services. Fortunately, the companies have put in place account recovery procedures to assist if you find yourself in such a pickle. You’ll need to provide proof of your identity — and exercise patience, as recovery procedures can take some time.

I’ve Run Out of Storage, and Now I Can’t See My Gmail. Help! Running out of storage on your devices is bad enough, which is why many people supplement their data needs with online or cloud storage. Apple, Google and other companies typically offer modest amounts of cloud storage for free, though before long you may exhaust that allotment, as an AARP reader who contacted us found out. He reported that his incoming emails would bounce back to the sender with no way for him to recover them later, unless he freed up space or paid for more. This column addressed ways to do that.

Moving Photos Between PC and iPhone Made Easy. You have a Windows PC but an iPhone from Apple. You want to share pics taken with the handset on a PC from Microsoft or one of its computing partners. This is not an uncommon situation, since cross-pollination among tech products is often the norm. While we all favor certain brands, our chosen operating systems hardly matter when it comes to sharing pictures, whether through online storage, cable or other methods.

Please continue to share your comments and tech struggles with me. As I’ve said before, there’s no such thing as a dumb question. In the meantime, I wish all of you a prosperous and happy new year.                   

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Edward C. Baig covers technology and other consumer topics. He previously worked for USA Today, BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report and Fortune, and is author of Macs for Dummies and coauthor of iPhone for Dummies and iPad for Dummies. Follow him on LinkedIn; Threads; and X, formerly known as Twitter.