Yes, and the tech industry is already several decades old and multiple generations have come and gone, but today's tech consumers seem to be even less confident of poking behind the surface than those of the yesteryears.
And do note that there was a point in history when even basic literacy belonged to a small few who argued in exactly the same manner than tech people do today, i.e., that most people will never be able to understand basic science and maths, and we cannot hope for any better than to be benevolent dictators. Later history proved the hollowness of those claims. Today the majority in most of the developed and some of the developing countries are basically literate and what their grandparents couldn't imagine doing, they do effortlessly today. I don't see a single reason why computer sector should be any different. I'm not talking about a deep understanding of computers, just basic literacy that would obviate the excuse for tight, walled gardens and locked down devices.
> but today's tech consumers seem to be even less confident of poking behind the surface than those of the yesteryears.
To be fair, I'm less confident poking around behind the surface because what used to be relatively straight forward has become --for various reasons, few of which are legitimate in my eyes-- absurdly complicated.
> basic literacy that would obviate the excuse for tight, walled gardens and locked down devices
You can do whatever you want on a platform like Windows because they make their money off of selling support for their platform, and selling their own products for it.
Google and Apple do not make money selling support for their platform, and only Apple really focuses on selling products for it. But they both make money by tightly controlling their platforms, in order to to squeeze money from developers, [in the case of Google] from manufacturers, from carriers, from users' payments, and from all the data they collect about it all. They don't have to care about the customer at all, and they can just focus on engineering. It's the programmer's dream.
Their business model is a walled garden, and they pick the fruits of that garden. In the case of Google, they run the Android platform so they have a way to still make ad money if Apple denied them access to that platform. In the case of Apple, they run the Apple platform so they can make money from expensive consumer devices, and also use it to control more of the services/products we use.
So, it really doesn't have anything to do with literacy. Even if everyone were a genius, their choice is still A) don't use a smartphone, or B) use a walled-garden smartphone.
>I'm not talking about a deep understanding of computers, just basic literacy that would obviate the excuse for tight, walled gardens and locked down devices.
I disagree on this. I have a friend who has "basic computer literacy" as in knows how to use MS Excel, KeePass, etc. And yet, she inadvertently got a virus on her laptop. It was puzzling how she could have gotten it. She doesn't visit the usual suspects of porn/gaming/gambling/etc websites. Just normal stuff like CNN, WSJ, etc. The only reason we found out about it was her email account got locked out by the ISP. Apparently, the malware found her MS Outlook email account and used a hidden background service to send a bunch of spam messages using her email profile. Understandably, the ISP monitors SMTP traffic sent from residential addresses and when it hits an unusual threshold, they lock out the account. To clean up the malware, I reformatted her laptop and got the email reset with a new password.
On the other hand, with her Apple iPhone and the locked-down walled garden, I really don't have to worry about malware to the same degree. Yes, the Apple app review process is not infallible and theoretically, she could get infected by downloading a fake bank app that steals all her money. However, the possibilities for that nightmare scenario are drastically reduced in the closed Apple ecosystem.
Even programmers, who we'd classify has uber-computer-literate compared to the general population can unwittingly get bit by malware:
What's the solution for those programmers? Educate them on how to use computers? But they're already educated.
Yes, I get the hacker ethos of not having locked-down devices but we also overestimate the ability for the general population to maintain safe computing devices. Heck, I'm a techie that programs in Xcode and I'm not confident I'm really literate on all the vulnerabilities of the iPhone. Thus, it seems unreasonable I would expect non-programmers to "just be educated" to make the App Store's curation unnecessary.
And do note that there was a point in history when even basic literacy belonged to a small few who argued in exactly the same manner than tech people do today, i.e., that most people will never be able to understand basic science and maths, and we cannot hope for any better than to be benevolent dictators. Later history proved the hollowness of those claims. Today the majority in most of the developed and some of the developing countries are basically literate and what their grandparents couldn't imagine doing, they do effortlessly today. I don't see a single reason why computer sector should be any different. I'm not talking about a deep understanding of computers, just basic literacy that would obviate the excuse for tight, walled gardens and locked down devices.