this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Yes, same thing between computing hardware (I'm not gonna say computers, because for a lot of people nowadays, their only device is their smartphone) and cars. It used to be that things were more complicated to use, but easier to repair, so a large percentage of users could also repair their things.
Nowadays, you don't even need to know how to check your oil level because the car will tell you if it's low. You might not even have a dipstick. And with service intervals being 25000km and more, how much are you REALLY saving by doing your own oil change and stuff? I still do it, but
Similarly - as a kid, I had to fix small issues that popped up with Windows XP ALL the time. Couldn't connect to any website? Flush the DNS cache. No connectivity at all? ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew. Mouse stopped working AGAIN? Use the keyboard to navigate to devices, reinstall mouse driver.
If I was growing up right now, I'd have no idea how things work, because they JUST DO. So you don't learn a lot anymore. As for cars, I still learned because I grew up poor, so my first car was around 500 euros and I did everything myself.
Decided on a whim to fix up an old car from the 80s. I was able to tear it down to the frame and reassemble it with not much more than a set of imperial wrenches. That's a bit of an oversimplification but not much. And while there was a lot that could go wrong there was nothing that was a black box where you could get to a point where if something was wrong you would throw up your hands and say, “Oh, well. Guess this is garbage now!” Different time, I guess.
Yup, now you spend several hundred on a Chinese clone of whatever factory diagnostics tool allows you to code modules and such. And there are still probably things you can't touch.