Where did all the instruction manuals go?

 People love their instruction manuals. They love having something to reference. Something to return to and rely on when trouble or confusion pop up. You may have noticed they're gone. Almost nothing you buy today come with an instruction manual.

There are two primary reasons for this:

1) It saves money to not include an instruction manual. You can make yourself feel a little better by also saying it saves trees but really, from a business perspective, trees are just money.

2) Software updates to your device will soon make a printed manual obsolete.

These reasons also carry over to why the once plentiful market of "dummies" style books is shrinking.

You, the end-user, the customer, are meant to use online resources for your instruction be they videos, blogs, messaging forums or the manufacturers own website. Trouble is you need to know specific terms and what they mean to get any helpful results in your search. If you're patient you can learn a lot even by searching the wrong terms and reading through the results you get. In time you may be able to piece together what you need to know. By "time" I mean hours, days or weeks. Not minutes. Remember grade school? You didn't learn new concepts and ideas every classroom period. It took time. Time in the classroom and time at home with homework before you could make sense of things well enough to ace the coming test. Learning computers, phones and all the tech parts involved is no different. Be patient.

To get started pick a device you own. Your phone, your computer, your TV, your watch, your oven. Whatever it is just pick something.

Open up a browser (the Internet) on your phone, tablet or computer and type the manufacturers name, model number if you have it and the word "manual" into the browser search bar.

You'll get a bunch of results like this example of using Google to search for an iPhone 16 manual:

What you're looking for is the manufacturers name to be in the address of the result:

That's how you know you're about to click on a real, quality resource and not some shady scammy website trying to sell you something or get you to download something.

Following that link will take you to Apples instructional information for the iPhone 16. Unfortunately there isn't anything there for you to download and print out (I know that's what you want). You'll have to read the information in your browser. Companies like Apple do it this way so that when they change your phone through updates those changes can be noted immediately in the online instructions. And to save trees of course.

So give it a try. See if you can find the manual you're missing. Be patient. If you feel you're getting frustrated just walk away and do something else. There are no time limits and there is no urgency.