11 ms·

“Kids who grew up on smartphones do not know how to do anything on a computer”

89 points by kossTKR 5y ago

slindsey 5y ago
Is this any different from any new tech? The first car owners had to know a lot about taking care of that car. When I was young, you were expected to know how to do many regular maintenance tasks on your car and fix the simple things. Today most people couldn't do much of anything on a new car. Same trajectory.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  Wouldn't it be the other way around? As cars became more popular for transportation, people stopped learning how to take care of horses.
  - retrac 5y ago
    OP is referring to the improvement in cars over time. Something I just barely remember the tail end of (and I'm not old). Over the 20th century, cars went from something you basically had to be a mechanic to own and drive, to machines where you push a button and steer. Until modern engines under computer control (1980s) it wasn't guaranteed your car would start when you turned the key. Especially in a cold place like here. Pop the hood, fiddle with the carburetor, fiddle with the fuel ratio, apply a heating pad. Something like that was the morning routine for my father's old pickup truck. Such unreliability would immediately result in such a vehicle being discarded as defective today, but it was pretty normal back then. I seem to recall far more "sorry I'm late, but the car wouldn't start" even in the 90s than today. Of course, getting rid of the handcrank to start was probably the biggest improvement but that was before my time :)
    - nikau 5y ago
      The nostalgia for old cars being simple and reliable is baffling, I guess because they were always cantankerous a bigger failure wasn't as jarring, whereas modern cars are like appliances that work reliably all the time until something big happens like a timing belt or transmission fails.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Smartphones are basically computers with training wheels. People who never stop using training wheels do not know how to ride a bike.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  Not exactly analogous though. They didn't need to know how to fix their cars to get through high school assignments. How the hell did kids turn in essays and whatnot? I doubt they were printing them. Or was literally everything done in Google Docs?
  - asdff 5y ago
    Well, except if you took auto shop class during high school :)
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    I have a kid in HS and everything is google docs now. She does not know what a file or a directory is.
    - rchaud 5y ago
      When Chromebooks came out, Google made schools a major target for those devices. Looks like it worked. And meanwhile, the 'directory structure' of Google docs remains one of the worst I've seen. Haven't opened a document in 6 months? Good luck finding it without using the search bar.
    - chrismcb 5y ago
      Why not? A doc is a file, and GDrive still has directories, or folders. Not everything is a doc, there are sheets, pdfs, pics, among others
      - aidenn0 5y ago
        Usually when turning in it's either a document already created in google clasroom, so you just click a button and it turns in, or it's found via the list of "recently opened documents." I don't think she knows the difference between those document types other than she can type into one but not the others. A PDF and a read-only google text document are essentially the same thing as far as she is concerned.
    - nikau 5y ago
- choeger 5y ago
  Yes, it is different. With a car, no matter how modern, you still (used to) command where it drives you. In a smartphone, someone else makes this decision for you. (Or at least someone else limits your options.) There is obviously a difference between not knowing what a URL is and not being able to read assembly. Both could be seen as "arcane details of computer knowledge" that enhance your autonomy when using a computer, but one is in principle accessible to 95% of the world's population without much effort, the other is a highly specialized technical skill.
  - DeusExMachina 5y ago
    I don't think that metaphor works. On roads, other people already limited your options: where you can go, how fast, where you can park, etc.
  - wolrah 5y ago
    There's also a weird thing with computers where people are a lot less willing to think a problem through. If you put someone in an unfamiliar car and ask them to drive it somewhere, the most trouble they're likely to have is if they need to figure out how to turn on the wipers in the dark. The controls may vary but they're close enough that people figure it out. Put that same person in front of their work computer, but rearrange all the desktop icons and change the color scheme. There's a non-zero chance that they immediately freeze up and act like there's no possible way for them to do anything. They act like human macros, any slight change throws everything off.
  - chrismcb 5y ago
    The issue is, cars used to be all analog. You pull this wire that thing moves. But nowadays cars are more digital than analog.
- baron_harkonnen 5y ago
  Just because this is an older problem doesn't mean it's not a problem. Yes, people that loved fixing up cars would have complained about "kids these days" not knowing how to fix a car. I was certainly one of those kids. However seeing this happen with a field I know makes me realize those people complaining about people not knowing how to take care of their cars were right. And while this is true of "any new tech", it's a relatively recent phenomenon as tech has only been advancing this rapidly in last 100 years or so. It is a bad thing to be increasingly alienated from the tools you rely on for your day-to-day existence. Of course it's in part because cars and computers have both been increasingly designed by their manufactures to be difficult to take apart and understand. Tools that you don't understand increasingly control you rather than the other way around and I personally think this is a trend worth resisting. It's good to point out that this is an issue and even better to encourage more people to be curious, and learn how things work. Another example that I'm surprised of is people's homes. I know a shocking number of home owners that cannot fix a single thing in their own home without calling a "professional" (and it's increasingly surprising how many professionals also don't understand what they're doing!) This was extremely evident during the freezing temperatures in Texas where many people didn't know how to shut off the water to their homes. One of the best parts of the "hacker" mentality is to encourage people to not be scared of their tools and the things they own. While things have gotten more complicated, you can do a large amount of repair and modification on your own for almost everything. It honestly feels very liberating (not to mention saving you a lot of money) to snake a clog 12 ft deep in your drain, replace your car's serpentine belt, restore old hardwood floors, repair broken refrigerators from parts, etc.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - PikachuEXE 5y ago
    Hi fellow hacker here! I agree this is what a "hacker" truly means. We should "hack" more and gain back more control. The term DIY does seem to appear less these days.
- asdff 5y ago
  It goes beyond even tech. Home repair especially. The pragmatic knowledge had by my grandparents generation was just astounding to me. My grandpa was so damn smart. He was an engineer for Alcoa working with drafting tables and a slide rule. His brain was just rooted in mathmatics. One time we had a roll of some tar paper for a project and we needed to figure out how many feet we had left on the roll to see if we should buy another roll. He just put a ruler across the diameter, stared at it for a while, stared at the sky with his mouth open for a second, then he had the correct length. Blew my mind when I went home and looked up the formula he worked out correctly in his head in about 30 seconds: 𝐿=𝜋∗(𝑅2−𝑟2)/𝑇 I'd need to pull out a calculator to do anything with pi. I've been wondering why that is, why this older generation was so much more focused so to speak. It makes sense when you consider the cultural influences surrounding that. My grandpa grew up in the great depression and rebuilt china after the japanese occupation during WWII. It was a matter of survival and pride to focus and improve yourself for your family. My fathers generation, it was popular to ditch class to smoke weed in the woods rather than pay attention in class. My generation, it was popular to be on your phone all day rather than pay attention in class. If all the generations since my grandfathers were as focused as his was on learning things, my word, maybe their now wild predictions on the glorious would be future in the atomic age would have actually materialized.
deleted 5y ago
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hindsightbias 5y ago
Apple's What's A Computer ad from 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI-iJcC9JUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI-iJcC9JUc
- rchaud 5y ago
  That's just Apple marketing though. Since day 1 their messaging would have you believe that "computing" is the domain of fusty old number crunchers, while Apple products are somehow beyond all that. I appreciate Android more and more because from a design standpoint, it had "desktop" features on day 1. File explorers apps, or being able to choose which app to open a file with. Connect it to a PC and it becomes a USB storage device. Yet somehow Apple, which required the god-awful iTunes software to do anything sync-related, won the MP3 player battle.
Grustaf 5y ago
"It's such a shame that kids nowadays don't know how to read punch cards anymore" - HN reader in 1985 (colorized)
kossTKR 5y ago
This makes me wonder if the older generations with tech careers should feel less pressured by the newer generations as it seems there is actually a huge drop in knowledge - but this may be superficial knowledge that's easily learned? Does the younger generations actually need to know how a computer or the internet works, and is the pool of knowledge actually growing just not at a comparable rate to the entire population? I know many of us wether we are programmers, designers or STEM people in general all started tinkering by ourselves or with friends on a computer, in terminals, in Photoshop, with HTML or with games and modding on anything from Commodore 64's to Arduinos today - what is going to happen when kids aren't doing this anymore, or maybe they are but just in new ways?
- swman 5y ago
  I feel bad typing this because it’s just anecdotal but I do think the people just ten years younger than me seem far incapable of figuring really simple things out on their own. There’s no problem with asking questions but at least have some due diligence done. I really struggle getting that point across too because they want to be spoon fed the answer (btw these are folks from top 20 CS schools) or complain that nobody is training them. I guess that’s what being glued to a phone and social media for hours a day does to people. Again just my opinion from my personal experience.
  - kevinh 5y ago
    In some of the discords I'm in for programming as a hobby, I see people who are 10+ years below me that are far more motivated, knowledgeable, and competent that I was at that age (and some moreso than I am now). I doubt there's any significant differences between the populations.
    - gaspard234 5y ago
      This makes me think of my grandfather, a master mason who worked with thousands of other masons to build large parts of my city. That skillset is nearly forgotten. Sure there are great instructional youtube videos and instagram masons who are brilliant but the vast talent pool is gone. We struggled to find someone to patch a giant rock wall earlier this year. I understand why people don't want to learn it and haul rocks and bricks everyday but that knowledge base is on it's way out.
retrac 5y ago
The benefits/downsides of the modern user experience. Way back in the day, your odds of successfully using a computer were terribly low, without getting entangled in-depth in the technical details of how the computer worked. Editing text configuration files, wrangling with file systems, memory layouts and protection, hardware drivers, even patching binary executables with hex editors sometimes! All common experiences in the 1980s and 1990s. If you did anything more than run WordPerfect or SimCity (and often even then) it was basically unavoidable that you learned at least a bit about fairly low-level aspects of the machine you were using. Of course the fact that nothing worked well enough you had to do that was frustrating, but it probably also taught some useful skills and intuitions.
- bsedlm 5y ago
  I think we were at a sweetspot around the 2000s... The windows XP era. But this is most likely my own familiarity bias?
  - dunnevens 5y ago
    Determining the sweet spot is a fun thought. I'd argue for the Windows 7 era. General purpose computing is still the norm. The web & apps have almost as many services as now, but with less bloat and less tracking. There's social media but it's not completely dominant. Linux for desktop is beginning to be in good shape. Smartphones are available for those who want them but they're not dominant yet either. That's my personal one. I'm sure it'll be different for everyone else.
    - MarcScott 5y ago
      Windows 7 was the first time I installed a Windows OS and didn't have to custom install a bunch of drivers, it was all just done for me. I doubt most people, with the exception of builders of custom rigs, even know that a driver is a thing.
  - asdff 5y ago
    I think it was before that to be honest. I grew up in that era and gui mentality was tough to overcome. The cli was a black box for me for years. Once I learned bash I felt like I knew exactly how a computer worked and how a text file could turn into a 3d video game. Before that it was black magic.
olah_1 5y ago
ironically, they would probably find the command line more straight-forward than Windows desktop.
- mminer237 5y ago
  I highly doubt that. These are people who have essentially never used a keyboard to do anything but type messages. If they can't type in a URL, I doubt they'll be able handle a terminal. All the younger people I know just click icons. Even if they want to move something, they drag-and-drop. No one's heard of cutting or file extensions or knows the layout of a file system. They would understand zero parts of `mv ~/Downloads/photo.jpg ~/Pictures/photo.jpg`. The only way that would work is if your CLI is just a pipe to an improved version of Google Assistant or Siri that can generously understand natural language.
  - olah_1 5y ago
    Yeah you’re probably right about how none of them manually type URLs anymore. Precision in typing is no longer a necessary skill.
jonny_eh 5y ago
Is this globally true, or somehow worse in Japan (where the author teaches)?
- deleted 5y ago
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- blacktriangle 5y ago
  I have a theory about the Japanese and their relationship to the PC, having lived there for a bit in the mid 90s. This comes down to three things: First, Japan had a mindblowing consumer electronics industry way before we did. There were special purpose devices for everything you could want. They were all user friendly and did not require understanding how the underlying system worked. They didn't need a PC since all their electronic needs were already met and met better. Second, Japan is basically 99% urban living, as space is at an insane premium, and even when you are in the country the houses are built small due to culture and lack of open space, since if you're not in the city you're probably in the mountains. This means there was no physical place to even put a PC in most Japanese houses the way American houses might have a desk in a corner or even an office. Third, and probably the most important, phone calls in Japan were always pay by minute, even for local calls. This meant that if you were online with a modem, you were paying the phone bill just sitting there. This meant that if a person even had a modem, the would rarely use the internet. Since America had monthly-billed phones, there was no problem staying up all night on AOL chatrooms, and AOL really was the killer app that pushed PCs into American houses. IMO this is why the PC revolution that really took off in American homes, and by association a bunch of us who cut our teeth mucking about with bat files so we could play our DOS games and ended up learning useful skills out of necessity never happened in Japan.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    Fascinating. I wonder if the lack of early internet usage led to their companies falling behind on providing competitive internet services. I'm thinking of otherwise innovative companies like Nintendo and Sony that were very late to the game compared to their Western competitors.
  - 5y ago
Grustaf 5y ago
If that would be considered an issue, it would be the least worrying thing about smartphone addiction. Even if you would want your kids to grow up to become developers, there's no reason why they'd have to "learn computers" when they're young.
- Jensson 5y ago
  This isn't about individuals but about society. The past decades the number of computer literate adults has massively increased, which is a good thing. But the trend is reversing since the basics you learn when you use a phone isn't nearly as powerful as the basics you learn when using a regular computer. There isn't much we can do about this trend, it will continue no matter if we want to change it or not. But talking about a trend and what consequences it will have is still interesting.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    Sadly one way to look at this might be similar to "the number of people who can drive an automatic transmission and change their own spark plugs is decreasing." Its true, but the underlying tech is changing too, so is it really a problem?
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Smartphones doesn't replace computers though, every office worker needs to know how to use a computer since computers has an inherently more powerful UX. Smartphones has simpler UX, but computers has a more powerful UX. Applications being able to assume that you have a keyboard, mouse and big screen really allows them to create way more powerful interactions while any tool made for a smartphone will be severely hampered by its UI limitations.
      - blacktriangle 5y ago
        Take a small example. Is Figma replacing photoshop for designers? Is Google Office replacing MSOffice? If these were to fully replace their local counterparts, then they would also obsolete the whole concept of navigating a file system as well.
keybits 5y ago
Related, a great thread from simonw: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1440725351949213700 https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1440725351949213700 "This is fascinating: as-of 2017 university instructors have been increasingly encountering students who have absolutely no idea how files and folders on a computer work"
pengaru 5y ago
So typing a URL into a browser is today's opening a terminal to type a command, got it. I was a teen through the 90s, and had a small consulting/computer sales business in my 20s while it was still common for home PCs to be built from components, which exposed me to a decent cross-section of computer-using society (in IL) at the time. This was the early days for the Pentium class machines and Windows 95 was all the rage. Back then most adults didn't know how to use a computer either. The moment a terminal was required to get something done, eyes glazed over. If they couldn't simply point and click on something, it wasn't happening.
shahbazac 5y ago
I have also found this to be true. Very surprising and, frankly, hilarious. I teach an intro to programming course to grad students, many of them freshly minted undergrads. I've had to explain the concept of downloading files, file system directory structure and other basics. These are students are at a pretty good school, studying to become data scientists! The reason is exactly what the author in the link says. They grew up with smart devices, but apparently not desktop/laptop computers.
- foofoo4u 5y ago
  This reveals how the chasm between mobile operating systems (iOS, Android) and "desktop" operating systems (OSX, Windows) are impacting generations. The next generation live nearly their entire lives on smart phones and tablets. I think most almost never use a desktop computer unless they have to. And why should they? These mobile devices can do almost all conventional tasks that one would want out of a desktop computer. You mention that the concept of files is bewildering to them. And this makes sense when you consider the fact that mobile operating systems are "application based" while desktop operating systems are "file based". On a mobile OS, you never have to think about managing files. Everything is managed by the app. On desktops however, the user has more responsibility to properly manage files and have the appropriate application to run them.
shoo 5y ago
contrast: here's a fun interview with Matt Godbolt (of Compiler Explorer https://godbolt.org/ https://godbolt.org/ ) where he explains how he first learned to program -- first by typing Basic source code listings for games out of magazines into a ZX-Spectrum, then progressing to writing programs in assembly instructions and then assembling them by hand into machine code to enter into the machine as the ZX-Spectrum didn't come with free assembler. https://corecursive.com/to-the-assembly/ https://corecursive.com/to-the-assembly/
mywittyname 5y ago
Kids grow up being consumers of computers, but are never taught how to become general-purpose creators on computers. It's going to be strange seeing how this plays out. Will the consumer mentality bleed over into power users? Will schools bring back "computer basics" classes?
irrational 5y ago
It is amazing to me that a generation that grew up with computers is so technologically illiterate. I spend so much time solving technology problems with my kids (between the ages of 12 and 24) since they are clueless. It turns out that using phones, chromebooks, ipads, and a browser in a laptop is not enough to become technically literate. I even tried teaching them things over the years. They have absolutely no interest. They just want to get in there and go to Instagram, Spotify, etc. and don't want to know how any of it works. It is like someone who just wants to drive the car and doesn't want to know how anything under the hood works.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  It's so weird that your kids have different interests than you. Are they equally baffled about your lack of interest in their hobbies?
  - irrational 5y ago
    Their hobbies are literally instagram, youtube, and spotify. Any attempt to encourage them to expand their interest beyond these is met with indifference.
    - jonny_eh 5y ago
      Talk to them about what they're watching on youtube or listening to on spotify, those are their interests. The apps are the just conduits. It's like your parents complaining about TV and Nintendo.
      - irrational 5y ago
        You don't have any kids, do you? On youtube they watch people creating minecraft worlds. When I talk to them about why they don't play minecraft themselves they tell me they would rather watch someone else. It so strange. They don't play video games. They watch other people playing video games. On instagram they just look at pictures of other people doing stuff. It's like they are living vicariously through other people's lives (most of which are surely fake) instead of living their own lives.
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/o3k5rt/safari_15_on_mac_os_a_user_interface_mess/h2dxpla/ https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/o3k5rt/safari_15_on_... Link to old.reddit.com so you can experience the old, and far superior IMO, reddit layout if you're not logged in and have that option enabled.
agumonkey 5y ago
You can generalize to life, modern life crossed a line where the safety and comfort started to remove you from reality, skills and wisdom. Free is not good. ps: it's not a rant, it's a natural side effects of our cultures. The selling point of most things is to simplify actions. Until you have nothing to do or understand. Then people are stuck in their comfort zone, isolated from anything worth thinking about.
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y ago
Anecdotal: I went back to college for night school, and the classmates in my math course were all around 20 years old. I made a habit of sitting in the front row and taking photos of the whiteboard during each class, which I used to supplement my notes. Leading up to the final exam, I brought my laptop to class and burned all of those photos onto CD-Rs (for free) for anyone who wanted one. Anyway, when the students around me noticed that I was using the keyboard to drive this process instead of dragging files around, they were utterly amazed.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  I expected they would've been amazed at CD-Rs. Even back when I was in college the practice was to pass a USB stick around the class with notes, PDF of textbook, etc.
  - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y ago
    Coincidentally I was working at an antivirus company at the time, so if anyone had suggested such a communal USB drive I would definitely have opted out.
    - timbit42 5y ago
      This is why I use USB SDCard readers instead. I can write protect the SDCard.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Who even owns a disk drive anymore
  - wil421 5y ago
    I was in college 8+ years ago and we would use GroupMe. I’ve heard people still use it or what’s app. No need to share any type of media.
8ytecoder 5y ago
More of a failure of the education system. It was part of our curriculum that taught us how to use a computer, what internet is, how to use office (openoffice rather), sending emails, elements of UI, ...etc. This is 1998 I'm talking about - geez that's 23 years ago. I didn't grow up with a computer and this is how I learnt how to use one. This is basic computer literacy and there's nothing wrong in teaching it. (Way more important than programming IMO) Same with banking, composing a letter, sending money orders - you name it. We had one subject dedicated to this starting 9th grade. These days because tech is everywhere we seem to assume that we don't have to teach it in a formal way.
Apocryphon 5y ago
Bad news for PC gamers
pupppet 5y ago
It's made worse by the iPhone's hilariously bad support in allowing users to update the URL in the location bar. Try moving your cursor to the very end of the URL, it's an exercise in frustration.
- DoneWithAllThat 5y ago
  I only recently learned the “long press on the space bar” feature of iOS. It’s still cumbersome to navigate the url but far less so than tapping, which seems intentionally designed to be infuriatingly difficult to navigate.
asdff 5y ago
This is so true. I grew up in the GUI era and while I knew how to wonk the control panel better than my parents, the CLI was a black box for me for a long time. I couldn't even fathom how you could just write up some text into a file and that becomes a video game. It's probably so much worse if you've been handed an ipad or a chromebook and that's all you know. You don't even have access to the actual file system. These days though, the bar has been lowered dramatically. I work with some high schoolers for some research projects occassionally. This one kid must have been raised on ipads and chrome books. The goal was to copy the text output of some software connected to the instrument, paste it into a text document on notepad, and save the file. The kid looked at me like I was speaking french. I had to teach him how to copy and paste with a mouse, and teach him what a text file was. Are kids taught computer classes anymore or touch typing, like I was? Or are they just handed their school issued chromebook or ipad and its assumed they know how to open the browser to g suite? All these layers of abstraction make it hard to actually understand whats going on. It's like we've flipped the learning curve from being really hard at the start then easier (like learning CLI tools and programming then it "clicks" when you realize the syntax is similar across most languages and you can pick up anything easily), to really easy at the start and impossible to understand later because we abstracted away what actually happens.
spyckie2 5y ago
The generation gap is real, and it's rapidly shrinking too. 4 years apart is a completely different generation, at least experience wise. I can sympathize - it is tough to live in a world that isn't your own, where the default expectations isn't what you know. The same aggravation is played out when a dad realizes his son doesn't know how to make a shed or fix a car, and when your parents don't know how to use a smartphone or not get scammed by nigerian prince schemes. The world relies so much on established knowledge, and this established knowledge makes it hard for the generations to relate to each other.
perakojotgenije 5y ago
This is nothing new. Here is post from 2013 saying almost the same thing: Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you [1] [1] http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
- MarcScott 5y ago
  I just reread my own blog post and it makes me cringe a little, but nevermind. I was younger and angrier back then. However my point still stands, that digital literacy is on the decline. Having said that, I've raised four children and two of them are quite comfortable striping a computer down, reinstalling an operating system, using a CLI and SSHing into a remote Linux server to run Minecraft and CSGO. It's my current job to teach kids how to use computers, and I think we're making some progress.
  - npteljes 5y ago
    It's a very good article, solid points, illustrative anecdotes. The tone really fits the topic, as a fellow geek, I have a very similar experience despite being in a completely different life situation.
Pinus 5y ago
Isn't "not knowing how to type in a URL" what the web was supposed to be like? The URL:s were supposed to be a behind-the-scenes thing; the users were just supposed to navigate hypertext? Instead URL:s ended up front and center, and we got monstrosities like a domain name for a single movie, because that's the only way of making a short-enough-to-remember URL. Also, not knowing what application to open a PDF with... isn't that what we have tried to turn user interfaces into ever since someone invented the document metaphor?
- deleted 5y ago
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dragonwriter 5y ago
“Kids who grew up with cars do not know how to do anything with a horse.” “Kids who grew up with automatic transmission don't know how to do anything with stick.” “Kids who grew up with agriculture don't know how to hunt and gather.”
- Jensson 5y ago
  Mouse + keyboard + big screen computers aren't going anywhere anytime soon. When they start to migrate office workers to appstore devices rather than computers then I'd believe you, but todays appstore devices doesn't offer enough to replace computers.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Mouse + keyboard + big screen computers aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Yeah, and people still ride and otherwise use horses and hunt and gather, and cars are older than smartphones and agriculture is much older. The niches shrink, though.
- dmonitor 5y ago
  The issue is that computers haven't been replaced. iPhones still use files and directories, people just aren't allowed to look at all of them. They're being kept ignorant of how the device they use actually works.
kossTKR 5y ago
Hmm, i originally linked to this comment specifically: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/o3k5rt/safari_15_on_mac_os_a_user_interface_mess/h2dxpla/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/o3k5rt/safari_15_on_... Not the reddit top post itself - seems the link's had the querystring removed after a while? Anyways, that's the relevant comment that this thread should link to :)

89 points by kossTKR 5y ago

Is this any different from any new tech? The first car owners had to know a lot about taking care of that car. When I was young, you were expected to know how to do many regular maintenance tasks on your car and fix the simple things. Today most people couldn't do much of anything on a new car. Same trajectory.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
Wouldn't it be the other way around? As cars became more popular for transportation, people stopped learning how to take care of horses.
- retrac 5y ago
  OP is referring to the improvement in cars over time. Something I just barely remember the tail end of (and I'm not old). Over the 20th century, cars went from something you basically had to be a mechanic to own and drive, to machines where you push a button and steer. Until modern engines under computer control (1980s) it wasn't guaranteed your car would start when you turned the key. Especially in a cold place like here. Pop the hood, fiddle with the carburetor, fiddle with the fuel ratio, apply a heating pad. Something like that was the morning routine for my father's old pickup truck. Such unreliability would immediately result in such a vehicle being discarded as defective today, but it was pretty normal back then. I seem to recall far more "sorry I'm late, but the car wouldn't start" even in the 90s than today. Of course, getting rid of the handcrank to start was probably the biggest improvement but that was before my time :)
  - nikau 5y ago
    The nostalgia for old cars being simple and reliable is baffling, I guess because they were always cantankerous a bigger failure wasn't as jarring, whereas modern cars are like appliances that work reliably all the time until something big happens like a timing belt or transmission fails.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Smartphones are basically computers with training wheels. People who never stop using training wheels do not know how to ride a bike.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Not exactly analogous though. They didn't need to know how to fix their cars to get through high school assignments. How the hell did kids turn in essays and whatnot? I doubt they were printing them. Or was literally everything done in Google Docs?
- asdff 5y ago
  Well, except if you took auto shop class during high school :)
- aidenn0 5y ago
  I have a kid in HS and everything is google docs now. She does not know what a file or a directory is.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    When Chromebooks came out, Google made schools a major target for those devices. Looks like it worked. And meanwhile, the 'directory structure' of Google docs remains one of the worst I've seen. Haven't opened a document in 6 months? Good luck finding it without using the search bar.
  - chrismcb 5y ago
    Why not? A doc is a file, and GDrive still has directories, or folders. Not everything is a doc, there are sheets, pdfs, pics, among others
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      Usually when turning in it's either a document already created in google clasroom, so you just click a button and it turns in, or it's found via the list of "recently opened documents." I don't think she knows the difference between those document types other than she can type into one but not the others. A PDF and a read-only google text document are essentially the same thing as far as she is concerned.
  - nikau 5y ago
choeger 5y ago
Yes, it is different. With a car, no matter how modern, you still (used to) command where it drives you. In a smartphone, someone else makes this decision for you. (Or at least someone else limits your options.) There is obviously a difference between not knowing what a URL is and not being able to read assembly. Both could be seen as "arcane details of computer knowledge" that enhance your autonomy when using a computer, but one is in principle accessible to 95% of the world's population without much effort, the other is a highly specialized technical skill.
- DeusExMachina 5y ago
  I don't think that metaphor works. On roads, other people already limited your options: where you can go, how fast, where you can park, etc.
- wolrah 5y ago
  There's also a weird thing with computers where people are a lot less willing to think a problem through. If you put someone in an unfamiliar car and ask them to drive it somewhere, the most trouble they're likely to have is if they need to figure out how to turn on the wipers in the dark. The controls may vary but they're close enough that people figure it out. Put that same person in front of their work computer, but rearrange all the desktop icons and change the color scheme. There's a non-zero chance that they immediately freeze up and act like there's no possible way for them to do anything. They act like human macros, any slight change throws everything off.
- chrismcb 5y ago
  The issue is, cars used to be all analog. You pull this wire that thing moves. But nowadays cars are more digital than analog.
baron_harkonnen 5y ago
Just because this is an older problem doesn't mean it's not a problem. Yes, people that loved fixing up cars would have complained about "kids these days" not knowing how to fix a car. I was certainly one of those kids. However seeing this happen with a field I know makes me realize those people complaining about people not knowing how to take care of their cars were right. And while this is true of "any new tech", it's a relatively recent phenomenon as tech has only been advancing this rapidly in last 100 years or so. It is a bad thing to be increasingly alienated from the tools you rely on for your day-to-day existence. Of course it's in part because cars and computers have both been increasingly designed by their manufactures to be difficult to take apart and understand. Tools that you don't understand increasingly control you rather than the other way around and I personally think this is a trend worth resisting. It's good to point out that this is an issue and even better to encourage more people to be curious, and learn how things work. Another example that I'm surprised of is people's homes. I know a shocking number of home owners that cannot fix a single thing in their own home without calling a "professional" (and it's increasingly surprising how many professionals also don't understand what they're doing!) This was extremely evident during the freezing temperatures in Texas where many people didn't know how to shut off the water to their homes. One of the best parts of the "hacker" mentality is to encourage people to not be scared of their tools and the things they own. While things have gotten more complicated, you can do a large amount of repair and modification on your own for almost everything. It honestly feels very liberating (not to mention saving you a lot of money) to snake a clog 12 ft deep in your drain, replace your car's serpentine belt, restore old hardwood floors, repair broken refrigerators from parts, etc.
- deleted 5y ago
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- PikachuEXE 5y ago
  Hi fellow hacker here! I agree this is what a "hacker" truly means. We should "hack" more and gain back more control. The term DIY does seem to appear less these days.
asdff 5y ago
It goes beyond even tech. Home repair especially. The pragmatic knowledge had by my grandparents generation was just astounding to me. My grandpa was so damn smart. He was an engineer for Alcoa working with drafting tables and a slide rule. His brain was just rooted in mathmatics. One time we had a roll of some tar paper for a project and we needed to figure out how many feet we had left on the roll to see if we should buy another roll. He just put a ruler across the diameter, stared at it for a while, stared at the sky with his mouth open for a second, then he had the correct length. Blew my mind when I went home and looked up the formula he worked out correctly in his head in about 30 seconds: 𝐿=𝜋∗(𝑅2−𝑟2)/𝑇 I'd need to pull out a calculator to do anything with pi. I've been wondering why that is, why this older generation was so much more focused so to speak. It makes sense when you consider the cultural influences surrounding that. My grandpa grew up in the great depression and rebuilt china after the japanese occupation during WWII. It was a matter of survival and pride to focus and improve yourself for your family. My fathers generation, it was popular to ditch class to smoke weed in the woods rather than pay attention in class. My generation, it was popular to be on your phone all day rather than pay attention in class. If all the generations since my grandfathers were as focused as his was on learning things, my word, maybe their now wild predictions on the glorious would be future in the atomic age would have actually materialized.

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hindsightbias 5y ago

Apple's What's A Computer ad from 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI-iJcC9JUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI-iJcC9JUc

rchaud 5y ago
That's just Apple marketing though. Since day 1 their messaging would have you believe that "computing" is the domain of fusty old number crunchers, while Apple products are somehow beyond all that. I appreciate Android more and more because from a design standpoint, it had "desktop" features on day 1. File explorers apps, or being able to choose which app to open a file with. Connect it to a PC and it becomes a USB storage device. Yet somehow Apple, which required the god-awful iTunes software to do anything sync-related, won the MP3 player battle.

Grustaf 5y ago

"It's such a shame that kids nowadays don't know how to read punch cards anymore" - HN reader in 1985 (colorized)

kossTKR 5y ago

This makes me wonder if the older generations with tech careers should feel less pressured by the newer generations as it seems there is actually a huge drop in knowledge - but this may be superficial knowledge that's easily learned? Does the younger generations actually need to know how a computer or the internet works, and is the pool of knowledge actually growing just not at a comparable rate to the entire population? I know many of us wether we are programmers, designers or STEM people in general all started tinkering by ourselves or with friends on a computer, in terminals, in Photoshop, with HTML or with games and modding on anything from Commodore 64's to Arduinos today - what is going to happen when kids aren't doing this anymore, or maybe they are but just in new ways?

swman 5y ago
I feel bad typing this because it’s just anecdotal but I do think the people just ten years younger than me seem far incapable of figuring really simple things out on their own. There’s no problem with asking questions but at least have some due diligence done. I really struggle getting that point across too because they want to be spoon fed the answer (btw these are folks from top 20 CS schools) or complain that nobody is training them. I guess that’s what being glued to a phone and social media for hours a day does to people. Again just my opinion from my personal experience.
- kevinh 5y ago
  In some of the discords I'm in for programming as a hobby, I see people who are 10+ years below me that are far more motivated, knowledgeable, and competent that I was at that age (and some moreso than I am now). I doubt there's any significant differences between the populations.
  - gaspard234 5y ago
    This makes me think of my grandfather, a master mason who worked with thousands of other masons to build large parts of my city. That skillset is nearly forgotten. Sure there are great instructional youtube videos and instagram masons who are brilliant but the vast talent pool is gone. We struggled to find someone to patch a giant rock wall earlier this year. I understand why people don't want to learn it and haul rocks and bricks everyday but that knowledge base is on it's way out.

retrac 5y ago

The benefits/downsides of the modern user experience. Way back in the day, your odds of successfully using a computer were terribly low, without getting entangled in-depth in the technical details of how the computer worked. Editing text configuration files, wrangling with file systems, memory layouts and protection, hardware drivers, even patching binary executables with hex editors sometimes! All common experiences in the 1980s and 1990s. If you did anything more than run WordPerfect or SimCity (and often even then) it was basically unavoidable that you learned at least a bit about fairly low-level aspects of the machine you were using. Of course the fact that nothing worked well enough you had to do that was frustrating, but it probably also taught some useful skills and intuitions.

bsedlm 5y ago
I think we were at a sweetspot around the 2000s... The windows XP era. But this is most likely my own familiarity bias?
- dunnevens 5y ago
  Determining the sweet spot is a fun thought. I'd argue for the Windows 7 era. General purpose computing is still the norm. The web & apps have almost as many services as now, but with less bloat and less tracking. There's social media but it's not completely dominant. Linux for desktop is beginning to be in good shape. Smartphones are available for those who want them but they're not dominant yet either. That's my personal one. I'm sure it'll be different for everyone else.
  - MarcScott 5y ago
    Windows 7 was the first time I installed a Windows OS and didn't have to custom install a bunch of drivers, it was all just done for me. I doubt most people, with the exception of builders of custom rigs, even know that a driver is a thing.
- asdff 5y ago
  I think it was before that to be honest. I grew up in that era and gui mentality was tough to overcome. The cli was a black box for me for years. Once I learned bash I felt like I knew exactly how a computer worked and how a text file could turn into a 3d video game. Before that it was black magic.

olah_1 5y ago

ironically, they would probably find the command line more straight-forward than Windows desktop.

mminer237 5y ago
I highly doubt that. These are people who have essentially never used a keyboard to do anything but type messages. If they can't type in a URL, I doubt they'll be able handle a terminal. All the younger people I know just click icons. Even if they want to move something, they drag-and-drop. No one's heard of cutting or file extensions or knows the layout of a file system. They would understand zero parts of `mv ~/Downloads/photo.jpg ~/Pictures/photo.jpg`. The only way that would work is if your CLI is just a pipe to an improved version of Google Assistant or Siri that can generously understand natural language.
- olah_1 5y ago
  Yeah you’re probably right about how none of them manually type URLs anymore. Precision in typing is no longer a necessary skill.

jonny_eh 5y ago

Is this globally true, or somehow worse in Japan (where the author teaches)?

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blacktriangle 5y ago
I have a theory about the Japanese and their relationship to the PC, having lived there for a bit in the mid 90s. This comes down to three things: First, Japan had a mindblowing consumer electronics industry way before we did. There were special purpose devices for everything you could want. They were all user friendly and did not require understanding how the underlying system worked. They didn't need a PC since all their electronic needs were already met and met better. Second, Japan is basically 99% urban living, as space is at an insane premium, and even when you are in the country the houses are built small due to culture and lack of open space, since if you're not in the city you're probably in the mountains. This means there was no physical place to even put a PC in most Japanese houses the way American houses might have a desk in a corner or even an office. Third, and probably the most important, phone calls in Japan were always pay by minute, even for local calls. This meant that if you were online with a modem, you were paying the phone bill just sitting there. This meant that if a person even had a modem, the would rarely use the internet. Since America had monthly-billed phones, there was no problem staying up all night on AOL chatrooms, and AOL really was the killer app that pushed PCs into American houses. IMO this is why the PC revolution that really took off in American homes, and by association a bunch of us who cut our teeth mucking about with bat files so we could play our DOS games and ended up learning useful skills out of necessity never happened in Japan.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  Fascinating. I wonder if the lack of early internet usage led to their companies falling behind on providing competitive internet services. I'm thinking of otherwise innovative companies like Nintendo and Sony that were very late to the game compared to their Western competitors.
- 5y ago

Grustaf 5y ago

If that would be considered an issue, it would be the least worrying thing about smartphone addiction. Even if you would want your kids to grow up to become developers, there's no reason why they'd have to "learn computers" when they're young.

Jensson 5y ago
This isn't about individuals but about society. The past decades the number of computer literate adults has massively increased, which is a good thing. But the trend is reversing since the basics you learn when you use a phone isn't nearly as powerful as the basics you learn when using a regular computer. There isn't much we can do about this trend, it will continue no matter if we want to change it or not. But talking about a trend and what consequences it will have is still interesting.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  Sadly one way to look at this might be similar to "the number of people who can drive an automatic transmission and change their own spark plugs is decreasing." Its true, but the underlying tech is changing too, so is it really a problem?
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Smartphones doesn't replace computers though, every office worker needs to know how to use a computer since computers has an inherently more powerful UX. Smartphones has simpler UX, but computers has a more powerful UX. Applications being able to assume that you have a keyboard, mouse and big screen really allows them to create way more powerful interactions while any tool made for a smartphone will be severely hampered by its UI limitations.
    - blacktriangle 5y ago
      Take a small example. Is Figma replacing photoshop for designers? Is Google Office replacing MSOffice? If these were to fully replace their local counterparts, then they would also obsolete the whole concept of navigating a file system as well.

keybits 5y ago

Related, a great thread from simonw: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1440725351949213700 https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1440725351949213700 "This is fascinating: as-of 2017 university instructors have been increasingly encountering students who have absolutely no idea how files and folders on a computer work"

pengaru 5y ago

So typing a URL into a browser is today's opening a terminal to type a command, got it. I was a teen through the 90s, and had a small consulting/computer sales business in my 20s while it was still common for home PCs to be built from components, which exposed me to a decent cross-section of computer-using society (in IL) at the time. This was the early days for the Pentium class machines and Windows 95 was all the rage. Back then most adults didn't know how to use a computer either. The moment a terminal was required to get something done, eyes glazed over. If they couldn't simply point and click on something, it wasn't happening.

shahbazac 5y ago

I have also found this to be true. Very surprising and, frankly, hilarious. I teach an intro to programming course to grad students, many of them freshly minted undergrads. I've had to explain the concept of downloading files, file system directory structure and other basics. These are students are at a pretty good school, studying to become data scientists! The reason is exactly what the author in the link says. They grew up with smart devices, but apparently not desktop/laptop computers.

foofoo4u 5y ago
This reveals how the chasm between mobile operating systems (iOS, Android) and "desktop" operating systems (OSX, Windows) are impacting generations. The next generation live nearly their entire lives on smart phones and tablets. I think most almost never use a desktop computer unless they have to. And why should they? These mobile devices can do almost all conventional tasks that one would want out of a desktop computer. You mention that the concept of files is bewildering to them. And this makes sense when you consider the fact that mobile operating systems are "application based" while desktop operating systems are "file based". On a mobile OS, you never have to think about managing files. Everything is managed by the app. On desktops however, the user has more responsibility to properly manage files and have the appropriate application to run them.

shoo 5y ago

contrast: here's a fun interview with Matt Godbolt (of Compiler Explorer https://godbolt.org/ https://godbolt.org/ ) where he explains how he first learned to program -- first by typing Basic source code listings for games out of magazines into a ZX-Spectrum, then progressing to writing programs in assembly instructions and then assembling them by hand into machine code to enter into the machine as the ZX-Spectrum didn't come with free assembler. https://corecursive.com/to-the-assembly/ https://corecursive.com/to-the-assembly/

mywittyname 5y ago

Kids grow up being consumers of computers, but are never taught how to become general-purpose creators on computers. It's going to be strange seeing how this plays out. Will the consumer mentality bleed over into power users? Will schools bring back "computer basics" classes?

irrational 5y ago

It is amazing to me that a generation that grew up with computers is so technologically illiterate. I spend so much time solving technology problems with my kids (between the ages of 12 and 24) since they are clueless. It turns out that using phones, chromebooks, ipads, and a browser in a laptop is not enough to become technically literate. I even tried teaching them things over the years. They have absolutely no interest. They just want to get in there and go to Instagram, Spotify, etc. and don't want to know how any of it works. It is like someone who just wants to drive the car and doesn't want to know how anything under the hood works.

jonny_eh 5y ago
It's so weird that your kids have different interests than you. Are they equally baffled about your lack of interest in their hobbies?
- irrational 5y ago
  Their hobbies are literally instagram, youtube, and spotify. Any attempt to encourage them to expand their interest beyond these is met with indifference.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    Talk to them about what they're watching on youtube or listening to on spotify, those are their interests. The apps are the just conduits. It's like your parents complaining about TV and Nintendo.
    - irrational 5y ago
      You don't have any kids, do you? On youtube they watch people creating minecraft worlds. When I talk to them about why they don't play minecraft themselves they tell me they would rather watch someone else. It so strange. They don't play video games. They watch other people playing video games. On instagram they just look at pictures of other people doing stuff. It's like they are living vicariously through other people's lives (most of which are surely fake) instead of living their own lives.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/o3k5rt/safari_15_on_mac_os_a_user_interface_mess/h2dxpla/ https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/o3k5rt/safari_15_on_... Link to old.reddit.com so you can experience the old, and far superior IMO, reddit layout if you're not logged in and have that option enabled.

agumonkey 5y ago

You can generalize to life, modern life crossed a line where the safety and comfort started to remove you from reality, skills and wisdom. Free is not good. ps: it's not a rant, it's a natural side effects of our cultures. The selling point of most things is to simplify actions. Until you have nothing to do or understand. Then people are stuck in their comfort zone, isolated from anything worth thinking about.

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y ago

Anecdotal: I went back to college for night school, and the classmates in my math course were all around 20 years old. I made a habit of sitting in the front row and taking photos of the whiteboard during each class, which I used to supplement my notes. Leading up to the final exam, I brought my laptop to class and burned all of those photos onto CD-Rs (for free) for anyone who wanted one. Anyway, when the students around me noticed that I was using the keyboard to drive this process instead of dragging files around, they were utterly amazed.

ALittleLight 5y ago
I expected they would've been amazed at CD-Rs. Even back when I was in college the practice was to pass a USB stick around the class with notes, PDF of textbook, etc.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y ago
  Coincidentally I was working at an antivirus company at the time, so if anyone had suggested such a communal USB drive I would definitely have opted out.
  - timbit42 5y ago
    This is why I use USB SDCard readers instead. I can write protect the SDCard.
- asdff 5y ago
  Who even owns a disk drive anymore
- wil421 5y ago
  I was in college 8+ years ago and we would use GroupMe. I’ve heard people still use it or what’s app. No need to share any type of media.

8ytecoder 5y ago

More of a failure of the education system. It was part of our curriculum that taught us how to use a computer, what internet is, how to use office (openoffice rather), sending emails, elements of UI, ...etc. This is 1998 I'm talking about - geez that's 23 years ago. I didn't grow up with a computer and this is how I learnt how to use one. This is basic computer literacy and there's nothing wrong in teaching it. (Way more important than programming IMO) Same with banking, composing a letter, sending money orders - you name it. We had one subject dedicated to this starting 9th grade. These days because tech is everywhere we seem to assume that we don't have to teach it in a formal way.

Apocryphon 5y ago

Bad news for PC gamers

pupppet 5y ago

It's made worse by the iPhone's hilariously bad support in allowing users to update the URL in the location bar. Try moving your cursor to the very end of the URL, it's an exercise in frustration.

DoneWithAllThat 5y ago
I only recently learned the “long press on the space bar” feature of iOS. It’s still cumbersome to navigate the url but far less so than tapping, which seems intentionally designed to be infuriatingly difficult to navigate.

asdff 5y ago

This is so true. I grew up in the GUI era and while I knew how to wonk the control panel better than my parents, the CLI was a black box for me for a long time. I couldn't even fathom how you could just write up some text into a file and that becomes a video game. It's probably so much worse if you've been handed an ipad or a chromebook and that's all you know. You don't even have access to the actual file system. These days though, the bar has been lowered dramatically. I work with some high schoolers for some research projects occassionally. This one kid must have been raised on ipads and chrome books. The goal was to copy the text output of some software connected to the instrument, paste it into a text document on notepad, and save the file. The kid looked at me like I was speaking french. I had to teach him how to copy and paste with a mouse, and teach him what a text file was. Are kids taught computer classes anymore or touch typing, like I was? Or are they just handed their school issued chromebook or ipad and its assumed they know how to open the browser to g suite? All these layers of abstraction make it hard to actually understand whats going on. It's like we've flipped the learning curve from being really hard at the start then easier (like learning CLI tools and programming then it "clicks" when you realize the syntax is similar across most languages and you can pick up anything easily), to really easy at the start and impossible to understand later because we abstracted away what actually happens.

spyckie2 5y ago

The generation gap is real, and it's rapidly shrinking too. 4 years apart is a completely different generation, at least experience wise. I can sympathize - it is tough to live in a world that isn't your own, where the default expectations isn't what you know. The same aggravation is played out when a dad realizes his son doesn't know how to make a shed or fix a car, and when your parents don't know how to use a smartphone or not get scammed by nigerian prince schemes. The world relies so much on established knowledge, and this established knowledge makes it hard for the generations to relate to each other.

perakojotgenije 5y ago

This is nothing new. Here is post from 2013 saying almost the same thing: Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you [1] [1] http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...

MarcScott 5y ago
I just reread my own blog post and it makes me cringe a little, but nevermind. I was younger and angrier back then. However my point still stands, that digital literacy is on the decline. Having said that, I've raised four children and two of them are quite comfortable striping a computer down, reinstalling an operating system, using a CLI and SSHing into a remote Linux server to run Minecraft and CSGO. It's my current job to teach kids how to use computers, and I think we're making some progress.
- npteljes 5y ago
  It's a very good article, solid points, illustrative anecdotes. The tone really fits the topic, as a fellow geek, I have a very similar experience despite being in a completely different life situation.

Pinus 5y ago

Isn't "not knowing how to type in a URL" what the web was supposed to be like? The URL:s were supposed to be a behind-the-scenes thing; the users were just supposed to navigate hypertext? Instead URL:s ended up front and center, and we got monstrosities like a domain name for a single movie, because that's the only way of making a short-enough-to-remember URL. Also, not knowing what application to open a PDF with... isn't that what we have tried to turn user interfaces into ever since someone invented the document metaphor?

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dragonwriter 5y ago

“Kids who grew up with cars do not know how to do anything with a horse.” “Kids who grew up with automatic transmission don't know how to do anything with stick.” “Kids who grew up with agriculture don't know how to hunt and gather.”

Jensson 5y ago
Mouse + keyboard + big screen computers aren't going anywhere anytime soon. When they start to migrate office workers to appstore devices rather than computers then I'd believe you, but todays appstore devices doesn't offer enough to replace computers.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Mouse + keyboard + big screen computers aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Yeah, and people still ride and otherwise use horses and hunt and gather, and cars are older than smartphones and agriculture is much older. The niches shrink, though.
dmonitor 5y ago
The issue is that computers haven't been replaced. iPhones still use files and directories, people just aren't allowed to look at all of them. They're being kept ignorant of how the device they use actually works.

kossTKR 5y ago

Hmm, i originally linked to this comment specifically: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/o3k5rt/safari_15_on_mac_os_a_user_interface_mess/h2dxpla/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/o3k5rt/safari_15_on_... Not the reddit top post itself - seems the link's had the querystring removed after a while? Anyways, that's the relevant comment that this thread should link to :)