Enshittification

They did. They also basically came in around the early 90's in San Francisco and all the tech hippies were like, "Yeah, we're gonna give people all these wonderful tools to create new realities and it's gonna be like a Star Trek utopia!" Then the VC investors and money men showed up and said "No, we're gonna use these tools on people to make them more predictable." So now instead of giving people tools, tech uses tools on people.

Most people suck with computers, no matter their age. There may or may not have been a time frame which resulted in a higher percentage of people knowing more basic computer stuff. Kids on computers tended to pick up more basic computer knowledge than kids only interacting with gaming consoles for the past 40 years. If you want to blame one thing for decreasing basic computer knowledge, kids being glued to their smartphones and not touching computers (laptops/towers) at all is the much more obvious candidate. Like kids playing on their N64 (insert arbitrary gaming console here) and not touching computers before. I think, OP, you're falling into a trap of over-projection, where you project yourself and your peers as a standard onto a generation/age-group, when most of us here on lemmy have always been the outliers. People are not "tech savvy"; never have been. Trying to put the blame on one company and product (no matter how evil and bad both are) for select age groups is ridiculous.

The laptops in 2026 will all have AI integrated into the hardware. It will be dependent on the AI in the cloud servers.

Finally someone who is sane & smart

This goes from all directions. Even with Windows now Windows 11 comes with DRM.

My son currently has a Chromebook with Linux, wine, steam. Not sure if your argument checks out.

Steve jobs is mot blameless here.

But yes.