> Also, what do tabs open have to do with IQ? It's a meme. > And how are non technical users supposed to know they should not do this? For the same reason yo

> Also, what do tabs open have to do with IQ? It's a meme. > And how are non technical users supposed to know they should not do this? For the same reason you need a license to legally drive a car. While I'm generally not a fan of the RTFM-attitude, I have absolutely no patience for people who are unwilling to even learn about the very basics of the complex machine they're operating. Why on earth doesn't "the computer guy" tell them about where to learn the basics instead? Teach a man to fish an all that... > There is, for instance, a large stack of perfectly fine laptops in my house because some people just bought new ones because the old one ‘was slow’ and they were fed up. There's several reasons for that to happen - sometimes it starts at the point of simply buying the wrong product. Leaving the whole why-even-a-laptop-in-the-first-place aside, I have been convinced for the past 10 years now that 90% of all laptop users would be better served with a tablet (preferably an iPad). First of all, non-technical users cannot make an informed purchase decision and way too often buy garbage products (e.g. low-tier CPU with not enough RAM) in order to save maybe 10%. Secondly, instead of learning about the product they own and its limitations, they pile on crapware on top of bloatware and not once even manage to do basic maintenance (like disk clean-up, which is literally just a button press away). "The computer guy" shouldn't "fix" their machines but advice them to just get an iPad instead - problem solved for both sides. It's pretty short-sighted to blame a particular set of software packages for a whole pile of problems that stack upon each other: • underpowered hardware • complex operating systems that require knowledge and manual maintenance to keep them running smoothly • increasingly bloated websites and ads (just test it yourself - HN allocates single-digit MB per tab, while a news site easily causes >200 MB allocations) • computer illiterate users that are unwilling to learn even the very basics about their machine (Sapere aude!) • an inability of users to judge their own needs and requirements vs their options in terms of technology (i.e. desktop PC vs laptop vs Chromebook vs tablet vs smartphone) • the failure of the industry to communicate their target audience (i.e. you don't need a laptop to watch some Netflix, browse the web, do photo editing, etc.) • not all operating systems are the same - sometimes all it takes is to make the switch (be that Linux or MacOS) But no! That's way too much thinking and way too differentiated a view point! It's so much easier to just blame Chrome. Or Electron. Or JavaScript. Or Windows. Anything but daring to actually form a complete picture... But hey, that's basically today's Zeitgeist in a nutshell anyway I suppose.