macOS Monterey
It is frustrating to see how stagnant desktop OS&#x27;s have become. Both macOS and Windows 11 have added incremental features that are surely nice to have, but no one dares to improve on the human-computer-interaction which has remained the same for decades now.<p>With the advances in AI and the ridiculous compute power of modern CPUs, we should be able to have OSs that are Digital Assistants.<p>Just one example:<p>- file management: Why even? Why expose most <i>regular</i> users to this metaphor in the first place. Mobile OSs have been rather successful in getting rid of this implementation detail. If I write a lot of documents and need to come up with names for them, I expect that to be sufficient. My Assistant will sort&#x2F;group&#x2F;maintain them for me and if I want to open the &quot;status report to vendor X from last week&quot;, then that should be enough. Make sure my documents are safely stored, encrypted and all that jazz. Don&#x27;t make me pick between &quot;iCloud&quot; or &quot;OneDrive&quot; or &quot;C:\&quot; or &quot;Document&quot; or &quot;Desktop&quot;. Index all the content I&#x27;m producing semantically. Just DoWhatIMean? (tm)
Have this be consistent throughout the applications I&#x27;m using - including web apps. (And why even make <i>that</i> distinction. Who here doesn&#x27;t have relatives who have trouble understanding the differences between locally installed applications, apps on their phone and web apps in the browser?)<p>Regular users are consistently struggling with low-level concepts like &#x27;files&#x27; and similar remnants of trying to emulate desktop metaphors from the workplaces of the 80ies.<p>&quot;Do you want to change the extension to .doc or change it to .txt&quot;? What?!?
&quot;Do you want to overwrite file &quot;xyz.xls&quot;? Overwriting sounds bad, what happens if I say no though?<p>That is just the tip of the iceberg where we are somehow tied to ideas of HCI that are rooted in the 70s&#x2F;80s.<p>I do appreciate being able to tell my phone &quot;Set a timer for 10 minutes&quot;, but where is
&quot;Plan a trip to Dallas for next week Friday&quot; - and the Digital Assistant knowing exactly what to do (since that ain&#x27;t its first rodeo)?