Sachin Agarwal is one of the founders of hip email blogging service Posterous – but he used to work for Apple, and like a lot of us, he has opinions about OS X.
His latest is something that sparks a certain amount of controversy, because he’s predicting the imminent death of the Finder.
Sachin’s been reading between the lines, and he’s convinced: the next major release of OS X will be radically different, replacing the Finder and the file system we know with a completely new model based on the iPhone/iPad OS. We will no longer have to manage files at all; our apps will manage them for us.
Furthermore, everything will be in the cloud, and synced automatically to all devices. “Don’t ask me anything, just make sure everything is everywhere,” he writes.
He adds: “Back in 1998, Apple killed the floppy drive with one fell swoop. Killing the PC desktop won’t be as quick and easy, but Apple will do it over time. It started with the iPhone, and in a few years we won’t even remember the Finder.”
Old-timers (myself included) find it disconcerting to even imagine this sort of approach. I’ve spent the last 20 years getting to know how computers work, and devised my own means of organising files which works pretty well for me. The thought of abandoning all of that is terrifying.
Then again, I’ve already abandoned it on my iPhone. I have no idea how my iPhone’s filesystem is arranged, or where it stores all my stuff. I just know that the stuff gets stored. So maybe this wouldn’t be such a bad idea on the desktop.
Much depends on how far Apple takes the iPhoneization of Mac OS X. Some people might be able to accept the loss of Finder.app, but the imposition of an OS X App Store as the only means of installing software on a desktop Mac might be a step too far for many.
