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Files.app an eventual replacement for the Finder?
- Thread starter KoolAid-Drink
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If you want to be specific, the Finder has been with the classic Macintosh operating system since its first inception in 1984, and continued its prominence in Mac OS X, starting in 2001.
And yes, agreed; however, it's possible Catalyst will gain more utility and become more Mac-like, in which eventually, down the road, all applications will eventually be Catalyst'd. We're already seeing signs of this, with Messages.app, which is actually Catalyst, but functions and looks like a proper Mac application. You'd have to be hard-pressed to see the actual difference between Messages.app and a traditional AppKit application, such as Safari.
Maybe if Apple ever starts afresh with a single OS for all devices (ie, appleOS), that will be when Finder will be renamed Files.app. I would suspect this would take place once Intel sunsets completely and there is no new OS support for Intel computers.
I’m wondering about this as well. I think the System Settings app could be informative. I don’t think they’d have to even really change the functionality that much. They could give it a new icon to match the Files app for greater continuity, and maybe just call it “Files Finder” or something like that? Or go 100% and rename it Files. But the core functionality would probably still be largely the same as Finder, just with a bit of a facelift to bring it in line with iOS and iPadOS for greater cross-system continuity. I actually think this would be a good idea, because someone new to the system doesn’t necessarily look at a smiley face icon and realize that’s where they need to go to access their folders and files. My guess is that this unification will eventually happen.