Installing anything meant reading manuals and inserting physical things. Blue screens were a weekly ritual. You knew what an operating system was because you had to reinstall it when it got corrupted. Younger generations grew up with devices that hide all that.
The kid's laptop is not a computer running software. It is just a MacBook. The operating system is invisible until an update makes things see-through. Then everyone is angry at Apple for moving the furniture for a day or two, then forget all about it again.
That's the OS behind this training friction story. The older person assumes the younger one, being a digital native or whatever, can understand the concept of hardware and software or at least knows what Windows is. The younger one thinks a MacBook is the whole ecosystem, not a laptop running macOS, and while both can generally do the job, when something breaks: Who you Gonna Call?