Should we really be designing mainstream computing, used by billions of people, for the 0.1% of dying old people born in the 1950s?

I hate to be crass, but this is such an unfathomably bad argument you present.

My grandparents are all dead, but my dad is 75 years old. He knows his way around a computer like the best of them, despite a life of working in transportation relatively disconnected from computers (Excel toward the end of his career, and that's about it). The other day he messaged me that, with a little help from a local computer repair shop guy, he managed to track down some new DDR3 memory for his aging desktop, and install it himself. In addition to that office PC, he runs a little Mac Mini with some hard drives connected to it, where he rips all of his old classical music from CD to FLAC.

My mom is the opposite. She still uses a Galaxy S8. We tried upgrading her to an S20, which we thought would be similar enough that she could handle it, while still getting security updates and such. Hard pass. Back to the S8. She'd look at an iPhone, apparently the apex of what you'd consider "good system design for old people" and have notaclue what to do with it. We're not sure what we're gonna do when that thing finally gives out in a way harder to fix than a screen or battery replacement. The phone may actually outlive her!

Turns out, I know this is crazy hard to understand: Everyone is different, but if there's one thing most people are the same in: We're generally kinda smart, and surrounded by technology. Today's grandmas may or may not look at a laptop and have a clue what an Internet Browser is. Tomorrow's have grown up with it! I'm gonna blow your mind here, one second: Today, as we speak, there exist grandparents who were born after Microsoft was founded.

We can't keep building tech for grandparents. Yes, technical literacy still varies wildly, but I think "going to a website and clicking download", while inherently risky, is not outside the realm of expectation for most people. Especially considering, in Windows 11, it probably won't even be necessary! Microsoft is opening the Windows Store to all apps, regardless of binary type, technology, payments framework, monetization framework, etc. I'll hate on Microsoft until the day I die, but that's a fantastic step forward in accessibility, freedom, and security; by comparison, Apple and Google are stuck in the past.

I actually find some inspiration in Satya's closing remarks from the Windows 11 announcement keynote [1]. Feel free to replace "Windows" here with "Linux", but definitely not iOS/Android; it ends with: "When I reflect on those chapters to come, I'm reminded of an analogy from a 19th century philosopher who compared creators to objects in our solar system. He wrote about meteors which flash and fade away, planets that burn longer but whose energy is confined to their own orbit, and compared them to stars that are constant and light the path of their own. That's our ambition with Windows; to help other stars and constellations to be born and thrive." What he describes is an unfathomably large problem; to be a platform of platforms, to lessen control and dictation over how people & developers use the platform, while still doing their best to keep it secure and easy to use. Its a significantly harder problem than, comparatively, Apple and Google's playing around in their little walled garden sandbox. But nothing in the world of computing would exist in Apple and Google's world. That doesn't mean their world isn't valid, but that world has become the entire world of computing for billions of people; the amount of innovation and value this has stifled may never be reclaimed, but we can at least do better moving forward.

[1] https://youtu.be/LIv5T3CvcbM?t=2366