fundamental knowledge never depreciates in value
"If someone told you that you really should learn the fundamentals of the internal combustion engine to own a car, you would tell them they were nuts."
Actually, if you told me that, I'd agree. You can pick up the fundamentals of the internal combustion engine in about twenty minutes -- and that little bit of knowledge could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a lifetime, regardless of how "user friendly" your car gets.
Cars, like computers, will always (for some definition of "always") have technical issues. If you don't know enough to determine whether they're issues you can fix yourself without being a technical professional, you're in for a world of hurt -- and you'll probably never know how much damage that lack of information can cost you.
It might take as much as an hour to learn similarly useful fundamentals about computers. Doing so can help a heck of a lot over the course of a lifetime: it can help you save money, time, and a lot of aggravation. Who knows -- maybe it'll even prevent some stroke, heart attack of aneurism when your computer sees fit to lose all of your most important files somewhere down the road.
Part of the reason for all the aggravating apparent inability of most end users to do anything intelligent is simply that they don't really comprehend the whys and wherefores of what they're doing. Consider that the next time you have to provide tech support because some "nontechnical" relative lost all of his or her files, got a system infected with spyware, managed to hose up email configuration, or any of a thousand other things.
Things don't progress to a point where knowing the basics doesn't help any longer. They just get to a point where you think it doesn't help, at which point you end up spending four thousand dollars for a professional to replace your spark plugs. At most, it should cost you an hour to learn the fundamentals of the internal combustion engine, twenty minutes to rule out the lack of fuel, air, or compression as the source of your engine's problem, another twenty perhaps to check out the various possible (and easily checked) reasons that you aren't getting any spark, and whatever the going rate is for a set of spark plugs and a spark plug socket for your wrench.
The fact that cars come with electronic diagnostic systems, "automatic" transmissions, and CD players that can play MP3s in no way changes that.
