My niece struggled with using a mouse when she was in middle school – her experience with UI was exclusively touch screens prior to that.
The verge had an interesting article on this phenomenon
I’ll add “it’s not their fault”. In the race to make technology intuitive and idiot proof we’ve removed the need to actually learn how technology works past a superficial level.
Yup the first person i thought of when seeing this meme is my apprentice, he is 19 and has only ever had an iPhone and cheap Chromebook. Even at school and everyone he knows is the same. We work in controls and all the technician side programs are all interfaces straight out of the 90s, I let him use my laptop the one day and he can barely use the menus, cant use any office program, had no idea what an IP address is and if the default com port doesn’t work there is no way he was going to end up at the device manager page. Not that most people wouldn’t have a bit of a learning curve.
Its the “apps” and web-apps its just one more layer of abstraction to turn your computer from a tool into an appliance.
He’ll be fine eventually, he’s going to buy himself a real laptop and start playing with it he said and there’s the internet to learn anything he could need eventually. (Well not always where we work but hell manage). But I’d have almost the same difficulty teaching a young man who’d never seen a computer before as I would him.
