this, more or less. younger people will pick something up and figure it out. old people get set in their ways and eventually don’t seem to care about learning anything unfamiliar.
obviously I’m generalizing big time, but it seems to hold true. My “old man” turn came with social networking. I know what it is, but I have no interest or desire to participate in it, even though I can see how pervasive it is.
My current computer was set up by an Amish friends son who was 10 to 12 at the time. Yeah – all kids are every bit as good as I think they are.
I gave undergrads a primer in IT for college degrees between '06 and '09. Some of the material on the course was outdated (I inherited it from previous instructor). Time and again I realised that most younger people really weren’t all that tech savvy, they weren’t afraid of computers, their phones etc. like some older folk but common basic skills like creating folders, saving files to retrieve later, were beyond the grasp of many of these 17-18 year olds. To a lot of them the computer was the browser, or indeed just Facebook. I realised echoing others here that computers had become appliance-ified. Similar thing happened with the motorcar in previous generations. Most younger people I know who can drive couldn’t tell you much about what is going on under the bonnet, they don’t need to.
Here is an interesting post about the situation in Great Britain:
I am 34 years old. I am constantly amazed that at this point things like basic (to me) office suite, photo editing, file management, and simple computer troubleshooting and, er, figure-it-outiveness are still marketable skills that set me apart from a significant portion of my coworkers.
Long may that continue. 
I teach a beginning college-level computer class, and this is still the way it is (if not worse). Only a rare student knows what folders are used for. I’m afraid that cloud storage will make it even more confusing (I want my students to use the computer lab’s drives, since they are backed up and allow for uploading to our CMS.) It doesn’t seem if it matters if it’s a student studying computer science or studying nursing, (picking two different areas), most just don’t have the experience that they’ll need to be successful unless they get some training.
I also teach a class in programming and included a section on scripting (using VbScript). What a disaster! It took three weeks to describe the difference between “cd images” and “cd \images” and the like.
Woooah, I didn’t know Windows had a shortcut for “relative to the drive’s root directly” until now. (I tend to use MSYS instead of CMD because I’m far more familiar with Unix commands)
On the other hand, how good are kids nowadays at changing tires, let alone an oil filter? Or sorting dirty clothing to do the laundry? Replacing a lamp socket?
That is why so many of us old folks have the calling to be dumpster divers… 
Yeah, reminds me of the early days of radio.
Back in WW2 Americans in German POW camps were very good at building clandestine crystal radio sets. Why? They grew up in the 1930’s when radio was first beginning and the first radios with their tubes and such, were designed to be taken apart and repaired, or upgraded. Also crystal radios were big among the kids. So hence, they could build a crystal radios out of almost any bit of copper wire and magnet.
So its the same with computers. Years ago we could take them apart and upgrade them. Now you cant really take apart a notebook computer or an Ipad.
I’m 36. So I kind of grew up in the “golden age” of DIY computing. I copied BASIC programs when I was in kindergarten to my VIC-20, and even devised my own a bit later (mostly music and stupid quiz games). I upgraded motherboards, RAM, fans, hard drives, etc. for years. I remember making boot disks and simple DOS scripts so I could run King’s Quest 5 or whatever. Had to know the IRQ numbers for all the hardware, and assign ranges for the different types of memory, etc. I used DOSShell extensively. I used vim and emacs in college while I was studying LISP (ugh). I eventually learned some simple networking, too. However, I think my brain gave out a few years ago as far as all of that is concerned, and I just want things to work. That happened around when Win7 came out and I decided to dabble in group policy settings for all of our home PCs and made a big mess. 
Now I have a closet graveyard of broken PCs that I may fiddle around with…some day. The most creative stuff I do now is getting DosBox and other emulators to work properly.
My 16 and 13 y.o. can’t do the equivalent of any of this, but they can navigate all the social media and mod their games in seconds. But they call me over when they’re getting signs of malware. There’s little genuine curiosity about how it all works.
As a counterpoint, my thirteen year old nephew had zero idea how to set up Steam on his laptop last night. Which is fine, first time for everything and all but I don’t think that any of what I walked him through really sunk in. He’s not untouched by technology – he has an iPad and an Xbox and the family has some flavor of Macbook but he obviously hasn’t done anything more daunting than “tap it to make it go”.
I tried to interest my older son (15) in my latest computer build but it was obvious that he wasn’t having it. Just let him know when it was done and running so he could use it, he didn’t need to know how it came together. Which again is fine although it put me in the same frame of mind as the OP. I’m sure SOME kids are out there making Raspberry Pi driven robots but the tech savvy of your average teen doesn’t seem especially impressive.
Heh. This is basically me as well. Of course, the holy grail of boot disks was getting all the settings just right to run Ultima 7. I had a batch file (? . . . so long ago I don’t really remember) set up to run on bootup with different memory setting options for different games. Back in kindergarten/grade school I remember working on a BASIC choose-your-own-adventure style game (with a million GOTOs).
I’ve done some simple php and python programming in recent years for fun and profit, but my brain kind of decided to stop being thrilled by this stuff somewhere around 2004 or so. I’ll drill down into tech details if I have to, but it’s out of necessity, not out of fun.
This is true. The ability to book a flight to anywhere in the world does not make me Chuck Yeager or one of the Wright Brothers.
I work in tech, so my perspective is a bit skewed. But I suspect most kids are closer to my wife in tech level. She can use her laptop no problem. But as soon as she sees the “Updating % complete!” screen, she freaks out like “what is my computer doing?!!”.
I’ve met a lot of today’s youth that are terrible at computers. I’ve had “graphic designers” and “digital artists” not know the difference between JPG and PNG formats, much less how to tell Photoshop how to save to a different type of file. And they were completely resistant to learning how. Using google was a mystery. I remember staring at classmates in college, shocked that they didn’t even really know how file trees worked in windows. And now microsoft has made a point of indexing everything for search so you can just kind of save stuff wherever and windows will “find it for you” (which really, I abhor), which reinforces this type of ignorance of how windows works.
If I were to guess, even today amongst young folks I’d say there were about 8% power users - people who know what the registry editor is, for example. 20% advanced users - people who can easily handle malware infestations and put in new hardware, 50% average users - people who accidentally install bundled searchbars, get confused by access prompts, mostly just use facebook, games, and email, and are totally confused about how to send photos from their iphones but manage to suss it out eventually, and 22% are I don’t even know, do I double click to open files? What’s a My Documents? This message says my PC needs to be fixed!!! I just wanted to play Megazone Adware Brothers on Facebook??? Computers???
It boils down to either you’re curious and want to “get it” or you aren’t. And a lot of people aren’t interested in truly getting it, they just want it to work.
Mostly though the divide is that older folks don’t want to even try clicking on something new, and a lot of younger folks will at least be willing to mash some buttons and see if it works. Even that much goes a long way.
shrug
There’s only so many hours in the day. Time spent learning how to swap out RAM is time not spent playing FIFA or whatever.
Time spent learning how to swap out RAM (or upgrade video, etc) means better gaming in my experience. But folks can set their own priorities.
I was reading an article that for a lot of people, Facebook, Instagram or similar social networking site is basically the start and end of the internet for them. That is to say, they open their browser to where Facebook is their home page and that’s pretty how they interact with their computer.
Kind of explains why the trend is towards these Windows 8 style tiles on tablets. Users just want to pick up a screen and push a big button.
Apple’s iOS has featured multitasking windows for years now.