My son currently has a Chromebook with Linux, wine, steam. Not sure if your argument checks out.
Enshittification
What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
The laptops in 2026 will all have AI integrated into the hardware. It will be dependent on the AI in the cloud servers.
This goes from all directions. Even with Windows now Windows 11 comes with DRM.
Most people suck with computers, no matter their age. There may or may not have been a time frame which resulted in a higher percentage of people knowing more basic computer stuff. Kids on computers tended to pick up more basic computer knowledge than kids only interacting with gaming consoles for the past 40 years. If you want to blame one thing for decreasing basic computer knowledge, kids being glued to their smartphones and not touching computers (laptops/towers) at all is the much more obvious candidate. Like kids playing on their N64 (insert arbitrary gaming console here) and not touching computers before. I think, OP, you're falling into a trap of over-projection, where you project yourself and your peers as a standard onto a generation/age-group, when most of us here on lemmy have always been the outliers. People are not "tech savvy"; never have been. Trying to put the blame on one company and product (no matter how evil and bad both are) for select age groups is ridiculous.
Steve jobs is mot blameless here.
But yes.
Finally someone who is sane & smart
At the school I was at, it wasn't just that it's a Chromebook, but they also lock the Chromebooks down. You can't use the Linux sandbox feature or the android features, and a proxy is enforced preventing you from going to any websites they deem distracting.
Thankfully, My third world country was too poor to afford Chromebooks, so we had to rely on regular PCs
Ah yes, a vast increase in the accessibility of computers actually made people less tech literate. This whole "gen-z can't computer like me" crap is just millennials entering into their juvenoia phase. I guess we're all just damned to become boomers, old and scared.
I think it's a legitimate concern. For car ownership, even after it became mainstream, people had a rough idea of how cars worked. There was an engine, brakes, tires, etc.
With computers, I don't think the average user has that same level of understanding. I could do some basic diagnosis if my car broke down, people can't do that on their computer.
Granted it's more abstract and changes more frequently than a car, but I think the average users is capable of learning basic debuging and should if they're on a computer or smartphone for a large fraction of their day. We just don't ask that if them and hermetically seal computer systems.
I'll come off it. I know plenty of 30 and 40-year-olds who are utterly incapable of performing the most basic of tasks on a computer. By your logic they should not have an issue since they grew up with Windows.
Some people are just really stupid and have zero interest in educating themselves.