Mate, the general population increasingly don’t even use desktops or laptops for personal usage anymore let alone a desktop OS specific IM client from the early 2000s.
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
Spoke to friend this week, she told me she doesn't have a computer. That's increasingly common. People get by with their phones.
A lot of this has to do with the ecosystem and how a device is presented and what the UX is like. Manufacturers increasingly want to lock things down and hide them away.
I agree that this trend should be fought.
The same could be said about 90% of laptops and desktops purchased for home use. How many people actually use "computers" for tasks they couldn't do on a phone or tablet if those devices had larger screens and keyboard support.
The true dumbification of computers started with smartphones. iOS and Android are the primary drivers of this change, of treating computers as appliances. Microsoft unfortunately embraced this trend in recent years, they quite openly say Windows is an OS-as-a-Service now[0]. Still leaves plenty of control points to exploit[1], but it starts getting in the way.
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[0] - https://mastodon.technology/@temporal/105385475519240956 - I almost spit my tea on my keyboard when I saw this popping up the other day.
[1] - That's why I'm using a Windows 2-in-1 instead of an Android tablet.
I remarked that UI/UX is so simple nowadays that kids aren't gonna have the wherewithal to do their own troubleshooting for bigger issues and how irreparable a lot of devices are now the insides of computers are gonna be completely foreign to them.
Gonna bookmark this now.
Yeah kids can't use computers, because they don't come with knowledge pre-installed, but the ones who are interested will figure it out. It's not like there's a shortage of resources. And if you're concerned about your own kids, then teach them and they'll have a nice advantage in school.
when steam engines were replaced with the otto motor and cars became available to the general population, people were able to repair and understand the engines themselves. they had an understanding of mechanical principles. a few generations later, and only car nerds understand cars.
everyone else has to go to a mechanic to understand why their car's engine won't start or why it sounds so strange. and those weird mechanics will fix the car for them.
nowadays people are mechanically illiterate.
/s
my point is, when a technology becomes convenient enough so we don't have to think about it while it fulfills it's purpose, then you don't have to understand it to use it.
this creates the need for specialists. is that a bad thing? i say no. who defines what should be basic knowledge and what not? we don't all need to be a mechanic, a chemist, a doctor and an ITC pro.
Is a tragically limited view of what computers are.
Programmable computers are fundamentally different from steam engines. A steam engine will never be anything except a steam engine. Most of the manufactured objects we encounter in everyday life are similar: single- (or occasionally multi-) purpose goods that do what they were designed to do.
A general-purpose computer is not like this. It can be made to serve virtually infinite purposes. It can be made to do things the manufacturers never imagined anyone doing, and things the manufacturers wished it couldn't do.[0] Almost nothing else has that kind of raw potential for human expression. Perhaps a blank notepad and pen might be analogous.
I guess you could say a computer computes, but that's using an overly broad term to deliberately elide the point.
The things is that you don't need to be an IT person to use applications, as it used to be. So fewer people learn IT skills just so they can play a game or layout a document.
I know very little about cars but drive one daily. I can see how other people don't bother learning about computers just so they can write up a report for their job or order stuff on Amazon.
I like your poetic description of general-purpose computers. But I'm wondering why you think less of general-purpose machinery.
In another sense, computers are closer to pencils and paper - they're the tools you use to design the rest of the tools. And that's something special.
A general purpose computer, on the other hand, includes a power supply, and generally doesnt need tools that change matter to retarget it for another application; the tools needed to do so are made of information, and are thus readily available.
Granted: we as CS folks and business folks are choking off our own sources of talent by hiding the tools and keys needed to truly examine our systems, all in the name of "user-friendlines", but its still possible to use what is exposed to learn computing basics like how wifi works, or what a proxy server are.
To be frank, I think this distinction is precisely why I get frustrated at computing incompetence: a PC at home isn't locked down and has access to these tools. Anyone can learn -- even using a web browser and notepad to write JS.
In contrast, learning how an engine works requires mass-based tools that are big and expensive and require careful knowledge of how to not harm yourself when disassembling or working on the engine.
This distinction is massive, and yet we still use analogies to cars. Shops with tools are not plentiful and readily accessible to average people, the engines can't be examined from the inside out, coils and springs are dangerous physically. I can't just go looking to take a class, either: not all schools have shops!
As recently as the early 2000s, ordinary users were comfortable searching out and installing new software. I remember Napster becoming absolutely massive, and it wasn't because the IT folks installed it for users.
People who don't know how to use computers treat them like a magic box that may or may not do what they want to, if they use the right magical incantation.
Computers inexplicably don't do what you want them to do all the time, though. Modern cars, by contrast, are incredibly reliable even with extremely insufficient maintenance.
Car analogies applied to computing tend not to be very good, at least partially for that reason.
Are these parts not part of the car?
And then there is the stuff that is often different car to car, like where lights are, how to adjust certain settings. Want to pair the Bluetooth in your Mercedes to your phone? I consider myself extremely proficient at computers and absolutely know how to use one in almost any capacity and even I’ve struggled with its lunacy (which is much more a reflection on Mercedes bad in-car systems that vary model year to model year and can differ based on what options your dealer ordered).
The author makes his point pretty clear here:
> Not really knowing how to use a computer is deemed acceptable if you're twenty-five or over. It's something that some people are even perversely proud of, but the prevailing wisdom is that all under eighteens are technical wizards, and this is simply not true.
He then offers some suggestions for how to help kids become more technically proficient with computers because he thinks it's a useful skill to have.
A common refrain is "I'm hopeless with math/numbers".
And to be frank, calculators exist, so as long as you know how to get to the answer you need... I don't think I have a problem with it.
A computer is something you can use to consume content or produce content.
A tablet is something you can only really use to consume content. (Regular tablet, not artist tablet obviously, and those generally have to talk to a computer)
We don't need to, true, but we can... and it can be fun too... why choose less, turning into mindless content consumers?
But the number of things you can do with a computer expands enormously when you know just a little bit of bash scripting, or python, or even Excel!
I set up a dedicated youtube-dl box in our office to get around the exact visitors-with-PowerPoint-and-YouTube-videos thing he mentions
I can certainly understand that one would do so on the go, but it seems extremely cumbersome to do a school assignment on a phone keyboard.
I think the average person that doesn't need to do heavy editing, coding, etc. can get by with an iPad Pro w/ some accessories.
Let's leave the general computing devices for people who actually need that power, just like the early days.
How about making _general_ computing devices more accessible via UI/UX to the _general_ public? That doesn't seem like such a crazy idea.
It doesn't matter how much you improve it's ui/ux... if it's not a desirable feature to the general population, few will ever use it.
This seems to be getting worse, for example Google and its financial institution partners have decided that general-purpose computing and payments aren't safe together. Google Pay suddenly started refusing to do contactless payments on my rooted phone.
While I agree with the sentiment, and some of the complexity is not essential, the adage still applies: "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler". At some point, "general computing" means there's some irreductible complexity that cannot be made simpler without the device ceasing to be general purpose.
That's pretty much what the iPad is. A general purpose computing device but easier to use and with tighter security than a PC. At some point you end up sacrificing versatility for accessibility to the masses.
This article explains it well: https://hisham.hm/2020/12/10/smart-tech-%e2%80%94-smart-for-...
With that attitude, eventually the impact of economies of scale will end up denying us the ability to afford those devices or to use them how we see fit.
The problem GP refers to is this: making computers is expensive, gets cheaper with economies of scale. But economies of scale are capital-intensive, so they exist only where there's a market for it. The market for people requiring general-purpose computation is small and getting smaller, while the market for constrained computing is only ever bigger. Which means at some point the capital-wielding companies will just leave the market, and the prices of new general-purpose computers will go way, way up.
On top of that, computers today gain most of their value interacting with other computers. Once the mainstream usage - like your e-mail or your bank - gets neatly packaged in sandboxed, trust-computing-enabled environments, the utility of your general-purpose platform will plummet. A dark but entirely possible scenario is that it eventually becomes illegal to use general-purpose computers to connect to such services, because "security".
I could picture a CPU design that had a boot key or other restricted features set by blowing fuses (or similar tricks) during packaging. The "developer" unit leaves them unblown.
If they're selling 10M "regular" units per year, and 5000 "developer" models over the product lifetime, you have to amortize the cost of special-casing the production line for a short run, and stocking and supporting a second SKU, over a relatively small sales volume. It could well be more expensive than the few cents of electricity per unit to blow the fuses in a standard unit.