Computers are an idealised example of an organised system which is assembled/operated by solving puzzles. Some people enjoy solving those kinds of puzzles. Most people don't. The first kind of person doesn't really understand the second kind of person - and vice versa.
Something interesting and disturbing has been happening over the last twenty years. The Internet stopped being a technological puzzle and became a social and political puzzle.
This kind of "cultural engineering" - where the currency is attention, influence, patronage, and sometimes actual spending, not puzzle prowess - appeals to a completely different kind of person. And these people have been driving the development of the Internet for a while now.
People who like solving computer puzzles have been completely blindsided by this and continue to act as if technology is still somehow primary - when it isn't, and hasn't been for a while.
Plenty of puzzle lovers don't care about computers at all. Plenty of good programmers and tinkerers don't care about puzzles of different kind.
The “internet” as a thing is still capable of the same things it was 20 years ago. The proportion of people using the internet who care more about the social and political puzzle rather than the technological is what dramatically increased.
I understand where you are coming from, and it makes 100% sense if you own a PC/laptop as well. But guess what? In a lot of places the majority of population (including younger people) do NOT have them. Their first and only experience of computers is a mobile phone. Even though "teenagers who care about computers" is a low number, now a lot of them won't realize that something like a general purpose computer exists (until way later, if they end up using a computer at work).
I grew up being fascinated with how useful and flexible computers are and fell in love with creating software. I'm quite sure that I would not have happened if I was born during the last 10 years.
Broadly, I could see two situations in which people only get a phone and have no computer: either "poor" countries, where they can't afford a computer and will get a phone that's better than nothing, and very affluent ones where they'll just get a phone or tablet and not care. Although I'm not sure that this second category has no computer.
While I do sympathize with this, and I think that it would more likely than not allow people to discover this curiosity by, as you say, being fascinated with how flexible phones would be, my point is somewhat different: this isn't "going back". Phones never were open. And I'm pretty sure that the people who can't afford a computer now couldn't afford one in the 90s.
As such, for me, this is more of a lost opportunity to progress rather than a regression.
> Phones never were open
They certainly were more open than today. It was much easier to fiddle around with the software with smartphones that Nokia used to have, for example. Both iOS and Android were easier in that respect, too. So there's clearly been a regression there. However, if you meant "phones were never as open as PCs", ah yes then I agree.
> As such, for me, this is more of a lost opportunity to progress rather than a regression.
I would agree with the spirit of that, but the problem is that a lot of computers are actually being "dumbed down" so that they are more similar to phones simply because a larger population is used to them. For example most young people might not find it weird if some day MS or Apple make it painfully difficult to install PC/Mac apps from outside their stores.
You're right we are not there yet (yay?), but we seem to be moving towards that.
Uh, as a young person during that time, I think there may have been one kid in my high school who was the right combination of nerdy and well-off to get a smartphone. It was still cool if your flip-phone came with any internet-connected features at all.
I’m not sure why it has become so common on HackerNews to defend this trend and/or pretend it’s not a trend.
When I was a kid we had 8bit micros. They were programmable but they were also eye wateringly expensive. So it was a struggle to own anything you could program at all.
Also they all came with closed source, proprietary OSs.
I used to spend a fair amount of time just starring at adverts for things I couldn’t afford and that would be obsolete before I could.
Now you can get a whole computer given away free on the front cover of a magazine and it will do a pretty good job of running scratch for you.
When I was in university in the Netherlands studying CS in the early 90s, many (I would say most) didn't care about computers; they were there because 'money later' or 'making games'. By far most never wrote a line of code. It was frightening (to me) how much they had to catch up as the lectures were fast paced. Many changed to psychology or law in the first 2 years.
Now we live in an age where multiple versions of nearly everything seems to be available. Just buy what you want, don't learn to make it would seem to be the imperative of the day.
That encouraged tinkering to a high degree. I remember having lengthy talks about what components to use to build a PC with gamers or videgraphers. The more computers become a closed box which can not be opened, casual onlookers will have no reason to even configure them.
The industry is simply not giving people a box to open.
The industry is, it’s people who don’t want it.
The sealed boxes are some combination of more resistant to damage and longer lasting and smaller fo factor that a modular box can’t be, the sealed software is less prone to malware and blue screens of death.
The cloud makes things work like an appliance, rather than having to worry about dying drives and backups and figuring out port forwarding on your router. It also helps companies extract maximum rents on their product, but the point is it came with some benefits that consumers do value.
Nowadays however most white-collar jobs and daily life tasks involve computers at some point, and knowing how to use & program them would make these tasks more efficient - almost too efficient, to the point where it goes against corporate interests (turns out society normalized and encourages business models that bank on artificially created or maintained inefficiency) which is partly why general-purpose computing is on the decline now.
> Not even to the level that I, a curious teenager, had experienced in those years
I think therein lies the rub. Teenagers curious about computers aren't very common. And even back then (early 2000s), my experience in Europe was the same [0]. Most of the people in my school didn't really care about computers. They had other interests and pursuits.
The difference today is that computers are much more widespread because they allow people to do much more diverse things. At the time, they would maybe type up a report or something and that's it. There wasn't Facebook et al., so many people didn't spend any significant amount of time in front of the computer. Idle time would mostly be spent in front of the TV or hanging out with friends.
I think the reason this perception comes up is that at the time, people who "spent time on computers" were doing so out of curiosity and interest in learning about them. So the shortcut is that since now many more people are spending a good chunk of their day in front of the computer, that must mean they're as interested in them as the "curious teenagers" of our time. That's simply not true. Just look at what they do on the computer. It's mostly idle scrolling on some form of social media.
And, to address the subject of the OP, I'm also wondering whether there's an actual decline in the "general-purposeness" of the computer, as opposed to there just being more "non general-purpose" computers.
There's a definite decline in the percentage, and maybe even in absolute numbers if we look at people who used to use computers because they had no alternative but who are now better served by smartphones or tablets and also for uses which need "specialized processors" (say ML).
I draw a parallel to my feeling whenever I see discussions about iOS being locked down and people expecting the whole of the HN crowd to be up in arms about it. In my case, I was one of those curious teenagers of yore. I still love tinkering with computers, etc. But phones? I just can't be bothered to care about them. Can I make calls and check some maps? It's great!
I have an iPhone and treat it pretty much like a dishwasher. I barely have any apps installed. Neither allows me to install whatever random app I want. It's not an issue for my dishwasher, and frankly, nor is it for my iPhone. Whatever "general computing" I feel like doing, I prefer doing it on an actual computer.
Of course, there are other philosophical considerations in this discussion which I understand and can get behind, but the point is that, to many people, a computer is an appliance. They want it to do certain things. Does it do that? Great! If it doesn't, it's not fit for purpose. They simply do not care if some guy some where would like to do some thing with it but can't because Microsot / Apple are locking it down.
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[0] I went to school in the suburbs of Paris, so many of the kids' parents were pretty well-off and many were even working in computer-related fields, so there wasn't any access problem. Practically all of them actually had at least one up-to-date computer at home.