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With this Mac in front of me, am I really digging into technical details more than on a Chromebook or iPhone? Taking away the iTerm2 window on the other screen

With this Mac in front of me, am I really digging into technical details more than on a Chromebook or iPhone? Taking away the iTerm2 window on the other screen (since not everyone is a programmer), all I've got is a web browser, calendar, and mail. In the OS X Tiger and WinXP days, probably the same plus iChat/AIM and MS Word. The trickiest thing was maybe saving a Word doc to a USB stick, which is still easier than using Google Drive. Old stuff that required command lines was harder, but I think that was niche and very few people understood it.

cogman10 2y ago
> Old stuff that required command lines was harder, but I think that was niche and very few people understood it. And this is why I'm telling you that millennials were more computer literate :D. We grew up when this old stuff that required command lines was the norm. Maybe you had to be there. The user experience drastically improved in pretty much every way as I got older. My first computer was DOS which is just a command line. Imagine doing everything through iTerm2 and that's how I and a fair number of millennials (particularly older millennials) interacted with computers. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 weren't much more than wrappers over dos. For a lot of programs you'd install (Doom for example, but also games like Warcraft and Warcraft II) you still had to do a lot of the work I described above to get them functional. From a windows perspective it really wasn't until windows XP or so that things became as smooth as you experienced. Everything before that was DEEPLY exposing nearly every aspect of how a computer worked to the end user. Mac was a bit different, it was always somewhat easier to use than Windows was. However, I and most of my friends dealt primarily with windows machines because that's where the games were all at (and they were cheaper for the hardware you got). My generation was the one where computers became cheap enough that everyone had one, yet still ran software written primarily for more technical computer people. OS and software devs spent literally decades polishing the UX by the time the first Gen Zers rolled around.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  So the average millennial actually used a PC regularly for these things? When I look online, I see something like only 15% of households had a PC in 1990, which is about what I expected. But then there's school and libraries.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    Yes. > When I look online, I see something like only 15% of households had a PC in 1990 Millennials go from 80 to 95. The oldest millennials were 9 at 1990. Just 5 years later, 1995, household computers rose to 39% in the US. For most millennials that boom in computers happened right at their formative years. The millennials were also driving a lot of it. Parents got computers for their kids.

cogman10 2y ago

> Old stuff that required command lines was harder, but I think that was niche and very few people understood it. And this is why I'm telling you that millennials were more computer literate :D. We grew up when this old stuff that required command lines was the norm. Maybe you had to be there. The user experience drastically improved in pretty much every way as I got older. My first computer was DOS which is just a command line. Imagine doing everything through iTerm2 and that's how I and a fair number of millennials (particularly older millennials) interacted with computers. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 weren't much more than wrappers over dos. For a lot of programs you'd install (Doom for example, but also games like Warcraft and Warcraft II) you still had to do a lot of the work I described above to get them functional. From a windows perspective it really wasn't until windows XP or so that things became as smooth as you experienced. Everything before that was DEEPLY exposing nearly every aspect of how a computer worked to the end user. Mac was a bit different, it was always somewhat easier to use than Windows was. However, I and most of my friends dealt primarily with windows machines because that's where the games were all at (and they were cheaper for the hardware you got). My generation was the one where computers became cheap enough that everyone had one, yet still ran software written primarily for more technical computer people. OS and software devs spent literally decades polishing the UX by the time the first Gen Zers rolled around.

hot_gril 2y ago
So the average millennial actually used a PC regularly for these things? When I look online, I see something like only 15% of households had a PC in 1990, which is about what I expected. But then there's school and libraries.
- cogman10 2y ago
  Yes. > When I look online, I see something like only 15% of households had a PC in 1990 Millennials go from 80 to 95. The oldest millennials were 9 at 1990. Just 5 years later, 1995, household computers rose to 39% in the US. For most millennials that boom in computers happened right at their formative years. The millennials were also driving a lot of it. Parents got computers for their kids.