Compare to an excellent report from the trenches: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co.... A very good read.
Trivially related, I'd like to preemtively apologize for some of that code. I am not actually a programmer, I'm a mathematician. I programmed out of need, until I was able to hire qualified professionals. Sadly, I did not stop there. I am a pretty horrible programmer.
Take for example brick and mortar architecture students. Most of those born mid 1970ies would at one point have put a lot of research in speccing out their personal CAD machine, learn how to apply cracks for the piracy countermeasures of the day and design multiple generations of less and less inadequate personal backup strategies. Their peers ten years older? None of that DIY, most would probably have jumped straight from paper to a professionally supported workstations. Their peers twenty years younger? Walled garden app stores.
I don't know where the barrier is. I can explain how a CPU works, the various protocols for some networking, etc... Those are what I'd say are at a superficial level. I haven't even built my own system - for years.
My son knows a bit, though his older sister knows less of the technical aspect - and she's a physician. She is a bit older than him. I'm not sure if it is strictly an age thing, I guess.
There's another way to read every single one of his examples: as evidence of a design failure. For example:
> A message box opens up, but the kid clicks OK so quickly that I don't have time to read the message.
Users are so bombarded by unhelpful dialog boxes that many are trained to dismiss them as fast as possible. It becomes subconscious, some users literally can't see the dialogs anymore.
> I hand back the laptop and tell him that it's infected. He asks what he needs to do, and I suggest he reinstalls Windows.
This is obviously not the users fault. It's the responsibility of the system designers to make it hard to subvert. iOS is now ten years old with no major malware outbreaks -- it can obviously be done (through means that the author doesn't approve of, like application signing).
> I take the offending laptop from out of her hands, toggle the wireless switch that resides on the side, and hand it back to her.
Poor design decision. Normal users in 2017 basically never want no-network, dedicating the cost of a physical switch to it is doubly bad.
My point is that the author needs to stop lamenting that the hoi polloi have breached the gates and start taking seriously the question of how to design general purpose computing that actually serves most human beings. "Use Linux" is not, by itself, a remotely helpful suggestion. His "Mobile" suggestion is indistinguishable from satire.
If even a company with $200B in ready cash on hand, humongous design and manufacturing resources, and full control at every part of the vertical stack can't make a general purpose operating system with these values, what hope do the rest of us have? iOS is extremely limited in what it allows you to do. If it isn't, then how come macbooks still sell?
I've been a tutor at the tertiary level before. Some people just can't be fucked putting in any effort to get what they want. Fuck them; they get to be called incompetent - don't shift the blame. If someone could barely drive a car and smashed it into every tenth lamppost, you'd call them an incompetent driver. Or another example: I can't cook for shit. I can follow a recipe, but it's not going to be very well done. But you would never make the argument that it's the recipe-writer's fault that I couldn't make a good souffle.
It's reasonable to expect users to meet developers at least partway here; reasonable to expect some learning curve for an incredibly complex, capable device.
But at the same time these are unnerving. It's not about "not knowing how to use computers" it's about NOT READING WHAT'S IN PLAIN SIGHT
He's not complaining that she doesn't know that the proxy blocks streaming video, he's complaining that she doesn't know that her powerpoint presentation uses streaming video and what the ramifications of that are.
Read the article again and this time actually look at what he's complaining about, not just the tech keywords in the story. His problem is with her demeanor, not her skill.