Parents the winner in Leopard, Vista showdown

When Apple unveiled its newest oper­at­ing sys­tem on Octo­ber 26, the com­puter maker made its first major over­ture to par­ents by infus­ing Leop­ard with a slick set of child con­trols. New set­tings help par­ents man­age a child’s time online, block use of cer­tain Web sites or appli­ca­tions like instant chat or iTunes, and watch over what kids do and who they com­mu­ni­cate with when Mom and Dad aren’t around.

Apple was play­ing catch-up to Microsoft’s parental con­trols for Vista, which the com­puter giant unveiled in Jan­u­ary. It, too, made its biggest push into the parental-control mar­ket with Vista, adding the same finely tuned fea­tures, so much so that parental advo­cates say Vista’s par­ent con­trols are a rea­son to buy the soft­ware. And that’s true of Apple now, too.

“The bat­tle to one-up each other in parental con­trols is only going to ben­e­fit con­sumers,” said Chris Swen­son, direc­tor of soft­ware indus­try analy­sis at the research firm the NPD Group. “There’s really no excuse now for par­ents not to lock down their PCs for their children.”

Par­ents are clearly pay­ing more atten­tion to tech­nol­ogy for man­ag­ing their children’s com­puter use, espe­cially as more kids ven­ture online at younger ages. As one proof point, U.S. retail sales of parental con­trol soft­ware were up 47.3 per­cent in the first nine months of 2007 over the same period last year, accord­ing to NPD, which tracks sales of major retail­ers such as Amazon.com and Best­Buy. Top sell­ers at stores are con­trols from Enter­ac­tive, Micro­fo­rum, and ContentWatch.

Apple and Microsoft don’t have num­bers on how many cus­tomers use parental con­trols, but ana­lysts say the fea­ture will eas­ily be a sell­ing point for Leop­ard and Vista this hol­i­day sea­son. Apple sold 2 mil­lion copies of Leop­ard in the first week­end it was avail­able, blow­ing away early adop­tion rates of its Tiger soft­ware. In con­trast, Microsoft has sold as many as 88 mil­lion copies of Vista.

Despite the uptick in U.S. retail sales of parental con­trols, some par­ents buy such soft­ware and then are left baf­fled by how to use it, or don’t have the time to prop­erly install it, accord­ing to ana­lysts and par­ent advo­cates. That’s why experts believe that operating-system soft­ware must be extremely easy and effec­tive to use–which both Vista and Apple have proved to be so far. As mil­lions of par­ents begin to upgrade their com­put­ers with the pre­in­stalled soft­ware, parental con­trols on the PC may start to become main­stream, they say.

“Parental con­trols at the oper­at­ing sys­tem level is really the best way on the fam­ily PC,” said Anne Col­lier, co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a com­mu­nity site for par­ents and kid safety. “There are more options for the par­ent and it’s seam­less, rather than hav­ing to install some­thing that may or may not crash the system.”

Fea­ture by fea­ture, Vista’s and Leopard’s parental con­trols are on par–with time set­tings, var­i­ous lev­els of site and appli­ca­tion block­ing, and log activ­ity files. But for par­ents of kids who play games online or on the desk­top, Vista offers par­ents an edge with more gran­u­lar con­trols for games. The set­tings include detailed age and con­tent appro­pri­ate­ness rat­ings for games from an indus­try non­profit called the Enter­tain­ment Soft­ware Rat­ing Board, or ESRB. Par­ents of a 5-year-old boy could allow him to only play “early child­hood” games, for example.

“That’s def­i­nitely a strength with Vista–where fam­i­lies are using it for gam­ing it has the rat­ing sys­tem so that par­ents can block games based on (their child’s age and con­tent appro­pri­ate­ness),” said Tom Laem­mel, Win­dows prod­uct man­ager. That parental con­trol fea­ture was recently added to Microsoft’s Xbox, too.

In terms of user inter­face, how­ever, Apple con­trols come off cleaner and sim­pler. Par­ents can con­fig­ure their child’s Apple home page dock with only three tabs and one-click options so that younger kids oper­ate the com­puter more eas­ily. Leop­ard includes drop-down menus for set­ting when and how long a child can be on the com­puter. Microsoft’s Vista, in con­trast, offers a cal­en­dar grid to set time.

In addi­tion, Apple’s Leop­ard set­tings newly enable par­ents to con­trol a child’s com­puter from their own, unlike Vista.

“We have a rich set of parental con­trols that are incred­i­bly easy to use and that give par­ents the flex­i­bil­ity to decide how to use them and to cre­ate a cer­tain expe­ri­ence for their child on the Mac,” said Chris Bour­don, senior prod­uct line man­ager for Mac OS.

Microsoft’s Laem­mel said the com­pany is good at remote admin­is­tra­tive con­trols in the busi­ness realm, but in the home, it’s unnecessary.

“Within the home envi­ron­ment, you want it to be straight­for­ward, you don’t want to have to have an IT per­son,” Laem­mel said.