They grew up on iPads and the iPod Touch, and their family's old phones. How much do they really use laptops or especially desktops? Maybe they use Google Docs and have never had to really look at their file structure or even understand it.

They never had to learn. Apple and Google spent a shitload of money on UI and UX, so we've hit a point where babies, who cannot talk, can navigate a tablet. If that's your version of the internet, your computer literacy goes way down.

It goes the other way too, sometimes. At my work, our IT is made up of mostly Gen X and Millenials, yet I was able to guess the admin password on my very first try. This is a big company. They have had the same password for years. If I was a bad actor, I could royally mess things up super quickly.

I think that these people are just about everywhere. I have yet to see an age group where a lot of people don't struggle with basic troubleshooting.

I agree, although I am more worried for Gen Alpha. With older Gen Z, many of us grew up with parents who didn't rush to give their kids access to social media. Just having a phone at all was MASSIVE in my peer group when the iPod touch came out in 2007. Technological advancement doesn't just wait years for us to define our generations easier. I had dial-up internet for years, yet I'm still Gen Z. It could be partially a regional thing, too. Things might be different where you live than where I live.

We should also look into why so many young people are growing up uneducated about technology, and we should collectively work on that. It's just like any other skill that parents don't bother to teach their children. You have to learn things from somewhere.

I think that many parents deserve blame in this too, not just the younger end of Gen Z who may still be in middle/high-school. A generation is a very large amount people to lump together, especially with how much we've advanced in that time. Play Battlespire (1997), then Oblivion (2006) and you will see a great example of that, over only 9 years.

It's always a weird cycle with generational stuff. Everyone categorizes everyone else on a large scale.