I'm far more of a Mac user, but I use Windows, too, and I agree that the Finder is quite inferior to Win Explorer. The simplest, most obvious things, such as having 2 side-by-side trees for file organization, or right-click on anything and create a new folder there--things that are easy and obvious--are NEVER going to come to Finder, which occasionally adds trivial eye candy such as "album flow" views or colored "tags", but basic workaday functionality, no.

Yes, you can buy a 3rd party replacement with the hassle of deploying and maintaining on multiple machines, if you have them, but my main complaint is what decades of not caring about the most fundamental of all Mac apps (the only one you can't quit) implies about Apple's strategic attitude toward the Mac overall.

For those of us who find the Mac the best pro dev platform, the implications are not good, because what we tend to like about it (desktop unix where all the client stuff just works) is just a historical accident that Apple would not create again and does not intend to maintain longer than necessary.

Rather than make the Finder more powerful to make the Mac better for serious users, Jobs took the approach that people who couldn't understand the difference between a file and a folder were the real market for Apple, solving the problem by creating iOS with no user view of the file system at all.

This turn from computer company to fashion accessory for those who don't care about computers per se was so successful as a business strategy that I can hardly criticize it. It just bodes ill for those of us who like the Mac for features its only supplier wants to be rid of.

Each time Apple has an event where Cook pointedly emphasizes that the iPad is "what we at Apple see as the future of computing", I google for an update on the current state of "best desktop Linux distro".