My nephew could competently use a phone (use apps, update settings, understand installing things, etc) when he was 6. A 13 year old will be able to catch up in a week.

I spent a while working in tech support for small to medium businesses, and boy, did those people have trouble to understand the basic interaction with their computers. Instead of learning the paradigms and applying them to general situations, they would memorise where on the screen to click, in which order.

You’re uncharitable view of generation Z is pretty much proven wrong if that is your assumption on what you can do on Instagram, though. Looks like a classic „my generation was the last good one, everyone else born after is stupid and lazy!“

> what you can do on Instagram,

Lol. Err what can you do on Instagram that is a demonstration of deep technical understanding?

Excluding people who are technical, whether by hobby or profession, everyone I know between 35 and 50 or so at least loosely understands things like the difference between a website and a locally executing program, the difference between local and cloud storage, the tradeoff between iOS-style walled gardens and relative openness of Android or PC (whichever side their own personal preferences happen to fall on), the difference between SMS and iMessage, and so on.

People under 30 -- again, excluding programmers, obviously there is no shortage of talented and knowledgeable young people in the industry -- overwhelmingly don't seem to be even capable of understanding any of these things.

Smartphones don't teach you anything technical in the slightest, most of them are extremely dumbed down black boxes engineered specifically so the lowest common denominator won't get lost on them.

They'll still have access to laptops & computers and whatnot at home, but kids just don't need smartphones that early on, or at least not ones with unlimited bandwith and access to putrid entities like tiktok and instagram.

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[1] https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...