A New Appreciation for How Hard Computers Have Been

Over the past six months, I’ve come to appreciate just how hard computers have been to use, even for those of us who thought we were comfortable with them. For decades, I mistook familiarity for simplicity. Only recently have I started to recognize how much complexity I had simply learned to navigate.I remember when my dad brought home a Macintosh. I remember using the Mosaic browser for the first time. I remember using iPhone on launch day in an Apple Store. I had no intention of buying one, but after spending a few minutes with it I was shocked by how different it felt and bought it on the spot.Looking back, what made those moments memorable wasn’t the technology itself. It was that they removed friction. They made computing more approachable for more people.The Mac did that in the 1980s. The internet did that in the 1990s. iPhone did that in the 2000s. And large language models are doing it in the 2020s.What’s been surprising to me is that I’ve spent decades feeling comfortable…