Some flip-phone from Sprint, though I can't even recall the name now. It had the ability to play text-based games and even snake! I think I was carrying a Palm Pilot near the end of that. It was an upgrade from the first brick I kept in my car for emergencies only. In 2004ish, I upgraded to a Siemens SX66 (Windows-based smartphone) and ditched the Palm Pilot. I continued to use Windows phones (I think I ended with an HTC Hero or something similar), until finally being convinced by borrowing a friend's old iPhone to get one of those. Was on iPhone from 3gs until 6plus. I made the jump to Android when Pixel 6 Pro came out, and that's what I still have today.
I've helped people order at various restaurants here in Japan before, and the kiosks definitely help in cases where people need to customize to avoid certain foods, etc. which are often hard when neither party speaks the same language.
Former gen-x here (I was gen-x when millennial used to mean people who graduate high school on/after the start of the millennia, but they moved x back to 1980 leaving me in a weird place). I think the main difference in younger people today is that their technological savvy is more in mobile devices since they are so powerful and so connected that they don't really need PCs for anything. I first noticed this living in Japan because they had very useful, high-tech hand-helds very early on. As such, I worked with many around my age who could barely even use something like Excel and had no computer troubleshooting experience. It seems to me like many of gen-z or possibly alpha don't have the PC side, but are very good with mobile.
A/B testing clean, minimalist, modern designs common in the West against modern Japanese designs always shows better results for the Japanese designs amongst Japanese consumers. I don't think they're going to cater to the 2.5% of foreign residents and others that might use Japanese sites (though I often wish they would)
Both things can be true, but Vermont doesn't have a giant "We're a high-tech place!" image harped upon constantly that can feel like false advertising.
Most of the world does not have central heat and central air.
In many areas, pools can be difficult due to a number of economic, social, and other factors.
Additionally, running AC constantly also puts more heat outside and, depending upon your power source, increases emissions further contributing to global climate issues just making things worse.
I've been using H&R block, but every year shit breaks and I have to fight with them. Latest was that my NRA wife broke all their validations (despite it properly flagging her an NRA)
Yep. Having worked in the industry for a long time, including trying to transition to EMR and such, I get this. In Japan, one of the reason fax machines are still important that is not often talked about is that they generally have a bank of pre-programmed numbers. This is seen as a way to reduce the chance of exposing PII to others by accident. This is not wrong, but the same could be implemented for other systems such as email (or the host of EDI that exist). I literally just had a training that said we should not even send a fax ourselves, but have someone observe that we hit the correct pre-programmed button for it.