> I tried to convert my 25 year old brother as well, but he switched back to Windows after a month. Despite being the youngest, he hated learning a new system and preferred Windows.
I've found this myself. My Grandfather loves Windows 8, my mother absolutely hates it. My Grandfather loves his new Android phone, my mum hates Android and refuses to use anything other than her iPhone.
Younger people may be more "tech-savvy", but at least anecdotally for myself they are the ones who hate change the most. Perhaps it's because the older crowd have fewer preconceptions about how things are "supposed" to work?
> The guy giving the talk said that their average employee is already confused if some icons on the desktop change and they are very reluctant to accept changes.
This accurately describes my dealings with non-technical people over 50. My parents - now in their late 50s and early 60s - have both worked with computers since the 80s. They worked in the administration of the government and a major bank. Yet they are having a really hard time switching from their previous computer (Windows Vista) to their new one (Windows 7 - I specifically avoided 8 because of the bigger UI changes).
Things like icons being organized differently, bookmarks being missing (how else would you navigate to Facebook or Gmail - the services they use most?) or their homepage changing. Things that seem beyond trivial for us, can pose a significant roadblock for people who didn't grow up with computers all around them.
Forget making fun of people Googling for "facebook" or "gmail" instead of using the simple URLs. A lot of people have a hard time even figuring out they can search for these terms.
> Adults (moreso as we age) are scared to press things they don't understand.
I have one outlier in my family. He's old, understands less and less about tech. like while ten years ago he was still able to understand how there are multiple Windows open on his laptop belonging to multiple apps, nowadays he starts confusing minimizing and closing apps, can't tell apart wether a program is running or it's just the pinned launch-icon, uses edge, Firefox and chrome interchangably and gets confused.... But at the same time, he still wants to figure everything out himself on both laptop and smartphone which resulted in hilarious mess-ups sometimes. I don't know if it isn't worse than a child. At a certain age a child might still get scared by some of the prompts, I've seen firsthand an 8yo going "oh no this costs money, abort" in panic. I'm not so sure my relative would do that when they think they know what they're doing...
Clearly the author is to old in body or mind or both. Yes I agree us old folk get stuck in our ways. But it's my kids that are going to love it, they already try and touch the monitor and TV like it was a smartphone, my 6 year old operates an iPhone perfectly.
Yes an article about old people worried about new ways isn't surprising at all heard the same tired tunes with regards unity which after a few release is starting to humm and now feels intuitive.
You can wait for windows9 all you like it will just be a more refined 8.
The issue is old people don't like change. If an older person is used to the WIMP interface there is no point forcing them to change how they do everything.
My parents almost solely used windows. I had an old macbook and gave it to them and they had a very hard time adjusting to the new UI, they kept asking for the Start menu.
Remember when Windows 8 came out and people were asking for the start menu?
> Cognitively, he's the same, so it's not that.
When did he learn android? It's much harder for older people to learn new things especially when they're used to something else.
I see this indeed, it is why some older people move almost entirely to an (entry level) iPad and are quite happy. The Windows laptop is something of a necessary evil to them, they use it from time to time but hate it (fear of virusses, nag ware, because they use it very little they always need to spend time updating, confusion because of Windows-S).
The thing I've noticed about the younger generation is that they are better at consuming tech intuitively, but mostly have no idea what makes it work.
They seem to be able to use technology almost instinctively, but if they have to troubleshoot or create anything they don't know where to start.
You have to design UI for 'digital natives' to be just as user friendly as you would for baby boomers that didn't see their first computer until after they were grown. Both of them would be equally lost if you plopped them down at a terminal with nothing but a blinking cursor.
This is generalizing, of course, there are exceptions.
Anecdotally the only thing that separates a 9 year old and a 60 year old is that the 60 year old won't want to touch a computer because they are afraid they will break something and the 9 year old will mash away until they get where they want to go. Neither knows or cares how or why it works.
> 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.
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.
That guy clearly has never been around 10 years olds, and vastly over estimates their intelligence.
I'm fact, all evidence points to younger generations being less tech savvy because they don't have to troubleshoot like the older generations did. Everything works, and almost nothing requires any technical configurations.
It is an interesting phenomena, but it's pretty easy to explain: the barrier for an older person is "using a computer". The barrier for a younger person is "using linux". The older person doesn't know or care about the operating system - they are going to use the computer (or not) for very specific things. The younger person, who is probably more of a power user, is going to be more "enmeshed" with the details of the OS, and find it harder to give up certain things.
Heck, the last time Windows was my main OS was in 2007 or so, and I still think in terms of "Alt-Tab" with the Command button replacing Alt (since I'm in OSX). (And the never-disappearing menu bar, and the inability to tab between windows, and the fact that the maximize button is broken, still bugs me).
> a generation that is struggling to use any tool that is not a touchscreen
This is exactly what I (and some colleagues) observe in academia, we now have first semesters that have grown up with smartphones and tablets but have never used "a computer" before.
That leads to some awkward conversations:
- "can you send me your file?"
student: "but I only have that in word?"
- "yes ... can you send it to me?" ... "
student: "but I only have that in word!"
- "... ?"
My prediction / fear is that this will only get worse over time as we have not hit the first generations that have been born after widespread touchscreen adoption yet.
Can we please get rid of the stereotype that older people aren't "tech savvy"?
Older people today have been using computers since they were in their teens or twenties. Conversely, I know a 20-something woman who can't understand why her iMessages quit working when she switched to an Android phone, despite explaining it to her multiple times.
That's really not true or fair. I'm in the process of giving my ~70 year old mother my old iPhone so I can send her photo messages and such.
The teaching experience I've had running through how to use applications is almost exactly the same as here. (Though I must say that this is on IO6). Simple things like the way you 'Add' or 'Edit' something being inconsistent really do throw her off. I'm sure anyone who has guided very none-technical people through using technology can relate. It's nothing to do with being 'an idiot'.
There are plenty of older people who take a lot longer to pick up technology like this, and it's also worth noting that as a demographic they are often wealthier than their younger counterparts, and a valuable customer segment.
What i don't agree with is that he focuses on the older generation, his mom, when the problems he describes won't exist as much for younger generations. His mom started using a computer past the point where it was hard for her to learn things. Of course it will be confusing to her.
Coming generations grow up with easy access to computers, and will know how to use them well. Eventually we will get to a point where very few people are computer illiterate.
Some anecdotal evidence. It took my mom 3 months to figure out how to make an itunes account, another few months before she figured out how to install an app. My 3 year old son had to show her how to play movies, on both the iphone and on boxee.
I never liked it, but maybe it’s because I was never really good at using Windows for what my family uses it for. I’m bad at windows, I’m bad at office and I’m terrible at printers. And since they always used whatever standard browser and usually some obscoure e-mail program for the e-mail that came with their cable internet 9 billion years ago, it wasn’t fun to be the “IT guy” just because I know how to write programs.
It was truly amazing for me when they all bought iPads and never needed any form of support that their immediate family couldn’t handle for them. Not only that though, it helped them get into the digital age, so they could use their online banking, be on social media with their grand children and be somewhat protected from themselves and the wider internet by Apples walled garden.
Of course the flip-side of this is that a lot of people aren’t actually very good at using computers today. Which ironically is a much bigger issue for younger people than the elderly. When I was in the public sector it was the 18-25 age group which scored the lowest on “digital prowess” which meant they’d sometimes get in a lot of trouble because they failed to perform some very basic tasks, like filling out a form on a website because “it wasn’t an app”. I guess you could argue that the public sector is sort of at fault for not building apps for everything to keep up with the times, but it’s something we see everywhere in society still. My wife works with dyslexic youths and it continues to amaze her just how much help they need to get the helper programs our government programs supply students with to work. To you and me it would likely to be a fairly simple task to get some document reader to work on Mac OS but she has students who need repeated lessons in how to keep it updated or not get locked out of it, or even how to get it to use a library as default if they aren’t saving things in the standard documents folder. I guess for most people it doesn’t really matter, but I think it’s amazing that we’re so digitally illiterate as a society in 2023. Especially here in Denmark, one of the most digitalised countries in the world.
on the meta level: Older people don't understand what is an operating system, is it different from Office? Or between an Icon and a Program. It's truly amazing that they actually can do something on the computer.
I've found this myself. My Grandfather loves Windows 8, my mother absolutely hates it. My Grandfather loves his new Android phone, my mum hates Android and refuses to use anything other than her iPhone.
Younger people may be more "tech-savvy", but at least anecdotally for myself they are the ones who hate change the most. Perhaps it's because the older crowd have fewer preconceptions about how things are "supposed" to work?
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