[neilalexander]

It's easy to say that files should be easy to understand by now but for a lot of people who aren't necessarily computer natives, there is a non-trivial learning curve as to what a "file" conceptually is: something that's on a storage device, that's in a specific part of some abstract folder tree, that is required to have a name, that has a type that may or may not in the name (file extensions), that has a format that some programs understand and others don't, that has an associated program or programs that know how to open it, that can be copied and that copies are in no way connected to the original that may be found in different locations to the original, etc.

Contrast that to how iOS just generally leaves applications to "own" their own data and present them however makes most sense, with only a few exceptions (the most notable being the Photos app, which sorts and displays photos by things that make sense for photos). The place where you'll find the thing you were working on is actually just in the app where you were working on it, which is, unsurprisingly, far easier to explain. Plenty of people get on perfectly fine without knowing or caring about "files" and are not really worse off for it.

[harperlee]

I have a hard time accepting that some of those are what trips people. That a something called “file” is in one place (device or particular location) seems more readily understandable than an ethereal thing that’s (sometimes, to some degree, at some resolution) ubiquitous.

The format topic is also something that I see causing frustration, but it is not complicated to understand, as long as someone is familiar with the concept of incompatibility (screwdrivers, human languages, etc.)

In my opinion at this day and age is more an issue of “never needed to learn / cared to” than that of “it is difficult to learn”.

[talldayo]

Okay, I'm going to take a hard disagree on this point. Apple's "abstraction" for viewing files is really not that deep. If you open the Photos app, you are looking at a bunch of files. Garageband showing it's saves, iMovie showing it's projects, iCloud showing it's folders, none of it is a particularly "simplified" view of things. At best, it's rehashing the MIME type filtering mechanism most mainstream OSes have used since the 90s. You really cannot argue that iOS is some different breed of computer when ultimately it's just creating a custom wrapper around things people readily understand.

[neilalexander]

I didn’t say that iOS is some different breed of computer, I said that it doesn’t present a lot of the complexity. Of course it’s all files underneath but the point is that they are usually presented in a way that doesn’t leave the user thinking of them as “files” as an abstract concept. People browsing through the Photos app aren’t really thinking about file names, whether it’s a JPEG or some other format, what folders they’re in etc. The “abstraction” doesn’t need to be deep to be effective.