Well...

My mom did teach me DOS, and programming, and a lot of other things – but these days she doesn't have that kind of patience anymore. If things don't work right away, out the window they go. For a lot of people the patience with technology decreases as they age.

Absolutely. I'm also an example of that. 15 years ago it was difficult to see my PC tower closed and without the entrails exposed, I was always trying strange Linux distributions and stuff like BSD or BeOS, and I configured everything I could in OSs and programs.

Now, if my hardware fails I just call tech support, I mostly use Windows, I almost never spend more than 5 minutes configuring anything, and any program I need to compile from sources is basically a no-no except if it's something I really need or can't avoid. In fact I'm so lazy that I tend not to install games that aren't on Steam, after being spoiled by Steam anything harder than double clicking to install game in each of my PCs seems like too much work to me.

In other aspects I don't think I'm so different from 15 years ago, this laziness with technology may be the aspect where I think age has manifested the most!

Not to be morbid, but at some point in my mid-late 20's I considered how many Sunday afternoons I have left in my life. The thought made me a lot less likely to want to spend them dealing with xorg.conf or fiddling with drivers. Though for me, the solution has been to use plain-vanilla desktop Ubuntu on a laptop that ships with it (XPS 13).

It has nothing to do with lazyness for me. When I was young I wasn't getting money for tinkering with hardware, neither for programming. Nowdays I get lots of money for programming...guess which of the 2 I'm doing more

For me it's about time. When I was a kid / teenager I had tons of free time for experimenting, and I didn't really care much for school. Now that I'm employed, I feel like those 8 hours are in fact the whole day. So I have less patience for things that are only tangential to the goal I'm trying to achieve.

This is true, while my mom never taught me too much she still did plenty in DOS. My dad on the other hand... He has an iPhone but would be happy with a flip phone, he uses the exact same amount of functionality that both phones carry, only difference being he has to touch his screen.

Off topic but just want to say, Apple knows there are many people like this, and the 16GB models are designed for them. I tire of seeing whines about 16GB being not enough. We the tech people are siloed in our own bubble and we often can't comprehend the existence of such people, unless they are our family members/close friends.

Well I don't mind him having a modernized phone, at least he gets a GPS. Not sure if he's ever used it, he probably could, he just likes to be simple I guess. As for the 16GB my only peeve against Apple (I'm an Android user though) is no availability to add in an SD card, even if it can't be used as "permanent" storage SD cards hold their value for being portable and transferable. It wont affect me as much though since I'm an Android user.

I'm inclined to agree with you though, except hard drive space is a lot cheaper these days, for about $10 I can have a 32 GB USB 3.0 thumb drive. Eventually the cheaper iPhone options should just carry a minimal 32GB if they decide to stop overcharging for more space. Videos and images are only going to increase in file size over the years to account for 4K adaptability, granted that might take quite a while.

My parents bought me my C64. I'll always be thankful for that and therefore will remain calm helping them out in this mad digital world they don't understand at all.

I also want to thank my parents for buying me C64, my first computer, especially during the time when my family wasn't doing so well financially; I can't ever be upset about giving tech support to my parents.

It reminds me of a C64 TV ad of a student who had to drop out of college because he didn't have computer skills to be competitive (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDcZeGbElnM). Somehow, it all seems relevant now, as C64 gave me a start on programming.