“somewhat” is doing a lot of work here. I mean, they didn’t re-write the kernel, but you can google example of the UI pre and post iPhone announcement.

The timeline is technically correct but misleading, and please google what Android looked like prior to the iPhone announcement. While you’re there, might also want to check out the technical differences like iPhone prioritizing things like animation and user interaction. Wouldn’t also hurt to check out the first, say, 1-4 Android devices compared to literally just the first iPhone and tell us which one our phones look like today. Also, do we think that Apple was just like “here’s a new OS we made over winter break?” They announced in '06. Android was developed probably at a similar time, bought by Google, and then had to pivot hard after iPhone announcement, and harder still after hardware actually got into customer hands.

Just about every invention is obvious in hindsight. Take a look at what Android looked like pre-iPhone announcement and then post.

Auto-correct. It’s fixed.

I worry a little about it, but I don’t lose too much sleep because in order to actually make anything on computers you end up in more open systems. Apple seemed to want to go hard down that path in the early/mid 2010’s with macOS, but even they’ve backed off and instead started opening more of iOS if only basically (file manager, for example.) Apple is generally the canary in the coal mine for computing trends in general. On the Windows side, they actually added the Linux subsystem thing, which was something you could have told me in 2010 and I would have assumed you were having some sort of stroke. And then there is the simple fact that Linux exists, and I can’t see that changing any time soon…

It’s not really exaggerated and it’s probably worse now. This is why it took so long for iPhones to even support the concept of a file manager; most people just do not get it no matter how much you explain it. I have three kids in school, from grade school to high school, and the concept of files is just… not a thing? Basically everything is in Google Docs or through some web communication type of thing. Email is all through Gmail or similar, and the idea of downloading a file or even just organizing it in Google Docs is not a thing they do. They’ve grown up with near instant search, and for most people that’s going to suffice. I grew up on DOS and then later Linux and such in high school, and even I eschew much folder structure more than a level or two deep (though my naming conventions for files has improved significantly) outside of programming projects.

That said, both of my two youngest kids followed the same path that you can probably find through most of the software industry, and though it’s not my day job, me as well. And that’s wanting the computer to play a game or similar, and then having to learn this thing. Minecraft has probably done more for the next generation of software engineering than any coding class or high school program. Both my gaming boys are totally comfortable moving around the file system. The youngest (10) is absolutely obsessed with modding, so he started by changing some params in an XML or JSON file or whatevs to now very nearly writing his own code. He publishes mods every now and then, which are more generally patches on existing, and I’m guessing within the next year or so, he’ll be writing from scratch.

eh, even growing up through the '90s where typing class was a thing, there were very clearly some people that got it and most did not.

These days, kids primary input device is probably a phone. I will out Mavis Beacon any of my kids, but the teens can damn near keep up on a touchscreen.

Sort of. Macs were doing this in the 80’s but they were super expensive. Still a popular option for schools, though. Growing up, we usually had Apple II’s in class (88-93ish) with Macs in some classrooms. It wasn’t until around the '95 era or just before that home computers became affordable, so it’s probably most people’s major exposure to GUI computing. Prior to '95, if you had a computer in the home, it was probably DOS-based and you maybe used WIn3.1. But Win3.1 wasn’t great, and quite a lot of home computers at this time were too underpowered to do much running it, so although I had access to Win3.1, in practice even at about 10yrs old, I just booted to DOS and often had to run programs off of floppies because HDD space was super limited and very expensive. When '95 dropped, it was definitely a paradigm shift in my house to go to that being the primary interface instead of DOS.

I’ll write my own config.sys and autoexec.bat in DOS like god intended, thank you!