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Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

I'm somewhat convinced that Apple wants to remove the notion of a Unix filesystem (there are files and directories of files/directories and they have owners/permissions/etc) from their users' understanding of how to use a computer. Both out of ideological purity ("what is a computer?") and so that their users can't use a different device that has an entirely different mental model for interaction.

I already see this with juniors/students/kids that grew up using nothing but mobile devices, tablets, and chromebooks with GSuite. They don't know what a file is.

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Yes, this is part of the genius strategy that most people don't see. There is an entire generation of people growing up where iPhones and iPads are the computer. Many of them also don't even know that there is a difference between a mobile device and an iPhone. Android is this weird sort of alternative that nobody uses, and Windows is this "PC" thing which they've never used but they hear that some people use for gaming. To these people, the Apple way is the way, and converting them to anything else will be nigh impossible. The current professionals that find iPads insufficient will age out, and the next generation will consider them the standard workstation.

Android is only used by 80% of the rest of the world, but who's counting anyway.

To a subsection of people, "the rest of the world" is a mythical place that doesn't exist.

So is metric

Indeed if are actually going to count, first we need to define which units are relevant.

The Plan9 discussion from a few days ago shows that quite a few people here don't know what a file actually is either.

I mean a file is fundamentally an abstraction, but it's a useful one. What that abstraction means is a bit obscure under the microscope but at a high level the understanding of directories and regular files is pretty straightforward (it's streams, sockets, links, and all the other stuff that pretends to be a file in unixes that presents the problem).

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