I have concerns too, but the file manager on macOS is not among them. The Finder has barely changed since its OS X 10.2 incarnation over two decades ago, except for gaining features (many of which were demanded by power users). A few settings need toggling on a fresh install (turning on status bar and path bar are musts, as is ~/Library visibility), but that’s the worst of it. Neither it nor the rest of macOS do much to go out of their way to obfuscate the filesystem.
iOS still needs work despite its file manager having become much more capable, but part of that comes down to the differing filesystem arrangement where user documents are kept within app bundles. If raw filesystem access were enabled, that model wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense even to many who are familiar with navigating filesystems. I could see the argument that it should be switched to a traditional desktop OS model, but that’s a deep architectural change.
Windows on the other hand… Explorer just keeps getting slower even if it’s not losing functionality, and Windows has always been poor when it comes to misrepresenting or obfuscating the filesystem. I hate trying to track down where files have been deposited in Windows boxes, and I would agree that it’s been contributing to users not understanding filesystems.
People being able to organise their lives with their computers has been a thing since the beginning of the personal computer. The filesystems we have were never really the 'best' - just the most viable.
The filesystem UI has been abandoned in favour of newer, better abstractions, such as 'just throw it all at the Cloud and let our analysis software give you a front-end to it, eventually..'
I think users not understanding filesystems isn't really a computing problem, but a literacy one. In some senses, computing becomes the victim of itself.
I would seriously question if “throw it at the cloud” is actually better or if it only became popular because that’s what’s most profitable for companies to push users into using. Local hierarchical storage doesn’t give nearly as many opportunities for rent seeking and data harvesting.
Cloud storage certainly has a convenience factor which is worth considering, but at the same time most people don’t actually need everything available everywhere at all times and only have a handful of files that can intentionally be synced as needed. I really don’t believe that supplanting traditional filesystems with a big bag of data that lives in the cloud is the right answer.
I think the point is that agency of the user over the locality of, and control over their data is based on decisions made by operating system vendors who, having 'given up' on trying to get users to understand the difference between folders and files, has figured out its better to just put everything in the cloud and 'own the tags and other abstractions' which come from a subscription service.
In any case, we see eye to eye on the convenience factor - it is inescapable, the success rate is clear - but we are looking at the edge case of things anyway, no? The future of Apple is an interesting one - we long term users surely can have an opinion. (Hacked my first Apple in 1981, haven't stopped since.)
iOS still needs work despite its file manager having become much more capable, but part of that comes down to the differing filesystem arrangement where user documents are kept within app bundles. If raw filesystem access were enabled, that model wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense even to many who are familiar with navigating filesystems. I could see the argument that it should be switched to a traditional desktop OS model, but that’s a deep architectural change.
Windows on the other hand… Explorer just keeps getting slower even if it’s not losing functionality, and Windows has always been poor when it comes to misrepresenting or obfuscating the filesystem. I hate trying to track down where files have been deposited in Windows boxes, and I would agree that it’s been contributing to users not understanding filesystems.