I highly doubt that people are thinking of 50 year olds when they're talking about grandmas.
But in answer to your question, I suspect the cliche will slowly die out when most of the 60/70/80 year olds we meet are tech savvy.
But in answer to your question, I suspect the cliche will slowly die out when most of the 60/70/80 year olds we meet are tech savvy.
- Your first computer given to you was probably a Chromebook at school. It is your browser. Every app is a web page. Docs, Sheets are all web pages. If you were rich or privileged you might have gotten a Macbook at school instead. But nearly everything is a web page. You use Google Docs with your friends and for group projects. I can count the people that had desktop versions of Word or Excel on one hand. You upload your videos to YouTube, presentations to Canvas or Google Drive, you don't bring in a flash drive. If you plug in a flash drive it might just show up as "External Storage (128 GB)" and not /sdcard or /media/USB0 or whatever. Even then, you don't really folder it up. You might use it to copy one file or a ton of images from one thing to another, then you format it when you're done. You don't just keep one around to build stuff up on, why bother, it's on The Cloud.
- You grow up with no hierarchical file organization. Imagine mobile. You have a "Pictures" tab I guess, and a "Downloads" tab? What else is there? You don't have album folders with FLAC files or anything; all your music streams, all your content streams, none of the apps that serve that content allow you to download them into the filesystem, if anything they do their best to prevent that. You don't have a filesystem path on iPhone. You have maybe tags and categories on Google Drive and you don't keep anything on it other than Sheets and Docs stuff that is listed by name, sorted by recent usage, and do not physically exist as files on the filesystem. Tap to select by thumbnail and Most Recent do an insane amount of work to hide what a folder is, nearly nothing but F/OSS f-droid apps on Android will expose things like /sdcard/Something or /sdcard0/emulated/Downloads. You get a selector of thumbnails.
- Mobile is first, always. Phones are cheaper than computers. Every kid has a phone, whether it's for legitimate use or for parents to abusively track them and monitor and record everything they do. Internet is always just kind of around you in the air, magically. You've never really had to think about how continents were connected, there never was a time in your life where the internet wasn't just magically all around you apart from during no signal areas. If you go to a location you ask for the wifi login. You don't ask where you plug in your ethernet cable. When you sign up for internet, unless you are specifically an enthusiast, your ISP gives you mesh wifi pods/gateway/whatever as the default. When you travel, hotel, coffeeshop, class, library, you get a wifi login. If you don't have wifi you use your phone or tether your laptop to your phone wifi.
- Rarely have a printer. If you print in class you weren't allowed to resolve paper jams yourself, and pro-tier laser printers almost never jammed even if you were doing 50+ pages at a time. When was the last time I had to print something? Your presentations are on Google Classroom/Google Drive/etc. Your homework is turned in online. Your concert tickets are on your phone with a moving barcode to prevent screenshotting (hope you have mobile service and it isn't too contended). Amazon returns are just dropped off and show them QR code, you don't print a label and they actively discourage you from choosing an option where you have to print a label.
You have to very actively seek out these things and want to learn, you can't passively pick it up like presumably in the past you had to tinker at least a little - tablets and phones are meant to force you to shut up and consume, not know about it. Chromebooks are intentionally locked down as hard as possible. Every app you use is probably a web page or a web page in a CEF wrapper.
For a long time now, they don't want typed and printed assignments; in fact some of my instructors in primary school would actually look upon these suspiciously - the default assumption is that if you are printing it out you are trying to bypass the anti-plagiarism system. That's also partially why every assignment is turned in online: your writing is run through one or more anti-plagiarism systems (and saved for later use against yourself and others).
Nowadays the most common use for my printer at home is making Amazon return labels.
It sounds like you're the person who could be the one to teach them this stuff, is that not an option?
Most younger people are also really bad at using computers.
No, not because they're ruined by smartphones—because most people seem to find most current operating systems and computer systems in general unintuitive and hard to understand. They always have and seemingly always will, unless/until UIs and core metaphors in computer interfaces change significantly.
The typical experience of most non-nerds using a computer, no matter their age, is repeating some steps they memorized and hoping the right thing happens. They don't make connections between functionality (say, thinking to try copy-pasting a file, not just selected text), they don't experiment because it usually gets them in some state they don't know how to get out of without help, and any change to UI layout or any kind of pop-up notification confuses the hell out of them. Desktop computers are mysterious, frustrating things. Observe some workers in a non-tech office using their work computers for a while and you'll see what I mean.
Bill Gates is 66
Jeff Bezos is 58
I think they're doing ok.