Personally I would not recommend an iPhone to an elderly person. They are not going to use 99% of the features anyway so what’s the point in buying an expensive phone when you can get them a cheap Samsung for 150 bucks.
The justification used to be that IOS was a friendlier interface but I think a combination of Android getting better and iOS getting worse means that that’s no longer the case. Hell their new design apparently makes everything transparent and hard to see.
Is usually around this point in time that they admit that they haven’t actually got the computer in front of them. I guess they’re just trying to memorise the instructions or something.