Do you think millennials who grew up with the early Internet and home computers will be as bad with future technology as boomers are with current technology?
My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We're in our early 40s.
People in here talking about how future generations might be less tech savvy due to growing up with locked down devices and phones. I am worried things might go a different way. If tech companies manage to push open systems out, forcing us all onto locked down computing appliances, I could easily see myself being left behind as I try to cling to the glory days of being able to actually code my own solutions and configure an OS to my liking, etc.
I worry a little about it, but I don't lose too much sleep because in order to actually make anything on computers you end up in more open systems. Apple seemed to want to go hard down that path in the early/mid 2010's with macOS, but even they've backed off and instead started opening more of iOS if only basically (file manager, for example.) Apple is generally the canary in the coal mine for computing trends in general. On the Windows side, they actually added the Linux subsystem thing, which was something you could have told me in 2010 and I would have assumed you were having some sort of stroke. And then there is the simple fact that Linux exists, and I can't see that changing any time soon...
How would that make free software and open hardware advocates be left behind? If anything, we would be the only members of society still knowing how things work and being able to figure things out and innovate. All other people would simply be slaves of whatever corporation would happen to own the important tech patents.