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One of my greatest culture shocks in terms of technology was around 6 years ago when I received an iPad, having no experience with Apple products. After the ini

One of my greatest culture shocks in terms of technology was around 6 years ago when I received an iPad, having no experience with Apple products. After the initial setup, the first thing I wanted was to transfer some files - TV episodes and PDFs - to the device. My first attempt was to SSH into it, only to discover that's not an option, and would require a third-party app store and jailbreak. Then I just connected the iPad to my PC by cable, expecting to see a mass storage device. No luck. Likewise, no luck finding a file explorer on the iPad. The iPad is strongly tied to the workflow that Apple suggests, and that's a workflow that removes files as a concept, abstracting them away. It's quite possibly a genius approach in terms of how accessible it is to non-tech people, even though it doesn't sit right with me.

folkhack 7y ago
Yep - had the same experience because I got into Procreate with the pencil and all (which is amazing). Had the same exact experience. It's a great device but I feel like they're dumbing computing down too much =(
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  apple is built on free and open tools, and you can’t make free and open tools on apple products. it is a sad state of affairs.
- benj111 7y ago
  "Procreate with the pencil" Some things you really need to keep to yourself.
barrkel 7y ago
I found it immediately limiting - either you put your stuff in one of the preordained categories like music, movies, photos, videos (and pretty much nothing else), or your stuff is siloed in whatever specific application you load it into. That's not a tool you can use to create things with, unless it's music, movies, photos or videos. It lacked the freedom to permit innovation. (I have never acquired an iPad beyond the first one I got, which was a gift.)
- lbotos 7y ago
  What did you want to create with it, that you couldn't? My parents went from "scared of computers" to "ipad" pros, because it's really hard to break or get hacked, it doesn't get viruses they know how to force quit an app. I'm scared of iPad getting files now, because it's going to be a mess for me.
  - barrkel 7y ago
    For me, files are the centre of the world, while apps come and go, companies come and go. Data is what lasts, and why it's so important to control it. I'd want to use command line tools - or UI's that are just as composable - to manipulate my files. The iPad perspective just seems completely crippled from the POV. Like a toy. Just to take an example - look at the Moon article also on the front page right now: https://medium.com/@sulej.robert/the-moon-made-twice-at-home-a2cb73b3f1e8 https://medium.com/@sulej.robert/the-moon-made-twice-at-home...
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      Apple pretty much has acknowledged that, and has been slowly introducing a file system interface over the last several years. If you haven’t looked at an iPad in awhile, you should to refresh your POV. The obvious buildup is to when the iPad transitions to a notebook computer.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  You can write on it, draw on it, paint on it, program on it, and you already mentioned video, photography, music, spoken word. Seems like an extremely powerful creation tool to me! You could create many of humanity’s greatest works on it! What are you expecting more?
  - drdeadringer 7y ago
    I expect actual control and ownership over those very creations I create. On your iPad, point to where your latest video file is. Show me. Where is it? "On The Cloud"? On the iPad itself? Three clicks deep in some random purpose-specific app separate from the soundtrack file you want to integrate into the video? What about five years from now, can you still access that video however and whenever and wherever you please?
beefhash 7y ago
I'm not sure if this is only an about accessibility to non-tech people. Think about it: You can't get files on your device in a useable format anymore. This means piracy becomes exponentially harder to consume (i.e. you can't use your iPad [easily] as a reader for your pirated ebooks). Quite honestly, that's a stroke of genius and likely a secondary motivation for this workflow.
- swiley 7y ago
  It’s always been pretty easy to read pirated ebooks on the iPad.
- RhodaLs 7y ago
  You can very easily use your iPad as a reader for arbitrarily downloaded ebooks. Go to Gutenberg or Archive.org or the pirate site of your choice. Select a book. Select the format. Epubs and PDFs have the option of being sent to iBooks. Mobi can be opened with a compatible reader app if you have one installed. And the file can be saved to Dropbox or whatever file service you have installed. With the latest version of iOS (IpadOS) you can save to your Downloads folder or even to a connected storage device, or to a file share on your local network. You can also load books via Dropbox, local network, or connected storage. I do this all the time. For me, it's convenient to use Dropbox as the intermediary, but there's plenty of other ways too.
- htfu 7y ago
  What? You can very easily use your iPad as a reader for pirated ebooks. Like, I cannot understand how it could possibly be made smoother than it is. Whether pdf or epub, and whichever device or type of device you use to add the file, once you do it will automatically be stored in your icloud and synced across devices. Same as any purchase.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  This is not true any more. I can go to a music blog on my iPhone, download a zip of an album to my phone using the Safari download manager, unzip it in place with the core iOS file manager, move the resulting folder into the media library folder for my music player app, and play it on my device. I can later open up the iOS file manager and find the mp3 for my new favourite song in my music player's folder, click Share and send the file to my friend on Telegram or whatever. iPhones are pretty reasonable piracy tools now.
gameswithgo 7y ago
i had a very similar experience and it is infuriating. i can’t believe nobody makes a smartphone that is just a computer. android is closer but its only a half step.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  We're very close with both the Librem 5 and PinePhone in their final development stages. They run actually Linux, and the PinePhone is only $150.
- PopePompus 7y ago
  Android with termux is a pretty good approximation to a handheld GNU/linux machine. You can access the files created by other apps on the phone, so it's easy to cat text files in your Dropbox area, etc. you can wget files from other machines. You can ssh into the phone from your desktop machine, and then work on the phone with a real keyboard. GNU compilers work on the phone. About the only complaint I have is that I have not found an X11 server app for Android that is useful, and it's not been for lack of looking.
- shantly 7y ago
  A smartphone that's "just a computer" is probably gonna be pretty bad for most people. Even the more-restrictive Apple App Store has to be constantly on guard against apps trying to get around the rules and spy on users and eat battery for no good reason and other undesirable junk—and not just little fly-by-night scamsters, but Facebook and such. Take away any effort to keep that under control and the experience for most of the non-HN crowd would be awful.
RhodaLs 7y ago
Six years ago it was possible to use Dropbox as the files intermediary. With the current version (13) of iOS, there's a fairly direct access to files. There's a files explorer with support for connections to network shares & external drives. Apple is less interested in abstracting them away as they used to be.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> My first attempt was to SSH into it Come on that’s not a sensible thing to expect from a non-specialist device, is it? I’m not sure this is a reasonable criticism.
- benj111 7y ago
  > and would require a third-party app store and jailbreak. Maybe not reasonable to expect it built in, I shouldn't have the jailbreak my own device though.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    It’s not your device. Or rather, you may own the hardware, but you don’t own the software on the device. You agreed to that in one of the many clickwrap EULAs you were presented with. Now then, don’t you feel so much better? /s
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ACS_Solver 7y ago
  Well, sure, I didn't expect it to be running a SSH server right away, but I was hoping to have a SSH option somewhere in the settings or, in the worst case, a downloadable app. It's a power user feature of course, but knowing that it's a Unix-based device, I absolutely expected easy SSH access. Then again, this is something that happened a lot with my brief use of iOS - I would repeatedly find that Apple clearly didn't intend for power user features to be accessed. I have no experience with OS X so don't know if the same applies there.
  - htfu 7y ago
    Back in the early jailbreak days I used to run a daemon so I could log in and poke around, but unless you’re developing, well what was your exact use-case? I never found one, it’s not a server. These days I use SSH a ton on my iOS devices through various apps and for many purposes (direct shell access, firing off scripts, port forwarding...) but that’s all logging into machines.
dreamcompiler 7y ago
The original iPod was a Firewire hard drive; you could connect it to your Mac and use it as a backup volume if you wanted. Apple took all that away a long time ago, and obviously it wasn't for technical reasons. It was so Apple could control and restrict how the customer used their devices. One of the many reasons why I changed from an Apple fan to an Apple hater.
- Trav5 7y ago
  Ha, that's how I got my boss to buy me one. I backed up the server and carried my music around with me. Now I just carry a portable hard drive...
- scarface74 7y ago
  You were able to use an iPod as a storage device throughout its entire lifetime. If Apple wanted to “control and restrict you” it would have been a lot harder to reverse engineer the iPod indexing format and allow third parties to write software that could store and retrieve music from the iPod.
  - dreamcompiler 7y ago
    At the beginning it was literally just a disk with an HFS+ file system. You could drag files to and from it with the Finder. No reverse engineering necessary.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      You’re talking about two separate things. You could never drag music to the iPod and have it recognized by the music player. You could always drag random files to it and have it work as a hard drive. On Windows it was NTFS (Fat32?) on Macs it was HFS+
      - dreamcompiler 7y ago
        I never mentioned music. I was talking about files in general. And even with music it was easy to drag music files from an iPod; they were merely in a hidden folder. I don't remember trying to drag music to an iPod with the Finder because it used to be so easy to do that with iTunes.
FpUser 7y ago
I was given iPad as a gift some years ago (they also gave a receipt). After playing with it for few hours and discovering that it does not let me do the thing I want I promptly returned it to the store for nice refund ;)
carapace 7y ago
Yeah, the iPad is a shopping mall.
fit2rule 7y ago
I use VLC on my iDevices, and I add media to it pretty easily. The fact that you expected this to work out of the box is interesting - I mean, I agree, it should work that way - but the fact that you can still very much manage your entire Media library on an iPad, user filesystem basis, shouldn't be discarded. You just didn't know you could do that with VLC maybe? (Or FileExplorer, or many of hundreds of other apps ..)
- ACS_Solver 7y ago
  From what I recall, there was some kind of problem with apps not making use of hardware video decoding. I vaguely remember trying VLC but only getting acceptable performance on Apple's own application without a jailbreak. This is circa 2013 though.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    The iPhone 4s and first generation iPad were capable of software transcoding video and playing it.
    - layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
      Parent was talking about not utilizing the hardware video codecs, which is indeed software “transcoding”. It drains your battery like crazy.
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    There are countless video players for iOS and most of them will use hardware decoding properly
galad87 7y ago
And then they added the Files app and brought back all the classic file handling. Because it was impossible to work with files siloed inside apps.
scarface74 7y ago
While I agree with the sentiment, it’s a few years out of date. Starting with iOS 8 - 5 years ago, Apple has had extensibility points where third parties like Dropbox and OneDrive could be used to store documents and used in the common places where you would want to save and upload files across apps. - of course the Files app was introduced two years ago. - there have been third party document providers that exposed an ftp server on the device that you could send files from. - apps like VLC expose a web server from your device you can use to upload files. - with iOS 13 you can connect a standard USB device or network file share and it appears within the Files app and any app that supports saving/loading files via the standard APIs - it’s still a sticking point that there is no easy way to add music to your library without going through the iTunes app.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  Files still doesn't have the concept of a 'home folder' on the local device. I heard they even had this feature in early betas but took it away.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - scarface74 7y ago
    You can download a 3rd party app that lets you use your local storage as a document location. https://medium.com/codezillas/how-to-add-a-local-folder-to-your-iphone-or-ipad-d6c9118e7aed https://medium.com/codezillas/how-to-add-a-local-folder-to-y...
    - ubercow13 7y ago
      No need any more, you can create a folder in the home folder without any link to any particular app
  - derefr 7y ago
    You mean the "On My [device]" folder, as referred to here? https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT206481 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT206481
htfu 7y ago
While it didn’t exist back then there’s been an actual file manager for a while now, and long before that files could be downloaded and opened by (hence stored with) apps, and then shared onwards if later settling on a different pdf reader or whatever. Other approaches like using iTunes to transfer files (again, to some specific app), while clunkier and less intuitive than mass storage, still worked. Apps like VLC could spin up a temp web server for file upload, and again if using device to pull from something instead of pushing from eg desktop to it, a lot of scripting and automation has been possible, essentially piping data and files between apps. So at its core I think it’s more about having a very app-centric approach, including leaving it up to apps whether (and how) to work at file level. Not exactly helping but hardly preventing either. Of course being accessible, nudging people towards sourcing their media through Apple etc are factors here, but there’s more to it than just limitations, and it hasn’t really been as heavy-handed or locked-down as many seem to think. Edit: whoops, started writing this before the other posts mentioning the same things, then returned and finished without refreshing. Oh well.
rsync 7y ago
"The iPad is strongly tied to the workflow that Apple suggests, and that's a workflow that removes files as a concept, abstracting them away. It's quite possibly a genius approach in terms of how accessible it is to non-tech people, even though it doesn't sit right with me." I ran into the same thing when I acquired an iphone. After moving all of my music files to the iphone (with itunes, etc.) - look at this picture: https://www.ilounge.com/assets/images/articles_tagging/2011/34.jpg https://www.ilounge.com/assets/images/articles_tagging/2011/... SO many choices ... and what is missing ? filename This comes into play when you have uncompressed, raw rips (WAV/PCM) of CDs which have no metadata - there is nothing but the filename.

folkhack 7y ago

Yep - had the same experience because I got into Procreate with the pencil and all (which is amazing). Had the same exact experience. It's a great device but I feel like they're dumbing computing down too much =(

gameswithgo 7y ago
apple is built on free and open tools, and you can’t make free and open tools on apple products. it is a sad state of affairs.
benj111 7y ago
"Procreate with the pencil" Some things you really need to keep to yourself.

barrkel 7y ago

I found it immediately limiting - either you put your stuff in one of the preordained categories like music, movies, photos, videos (and pretty much nothing else), or your stuff is siloed in whatever specific application you load it into. That's not a tool you can use to create things with, unless it's music, movies, photos or videos. It lacked the freedom to permit innovation. (I have never acquired an iPad beyond the first one I got, which was a gift.)

lbotos 7y ago
What did you want to create with it, that you couldn't? My parents went from "scared of computers" to "ipad" pros, because it's really hard to break or get hacked, it doesn't get viruses they know how to force quit an app. I'm scared of iPad getting files now, because it's going to be a mess for me.
- barrkel 7y ago
  For me, files are the centre of the world, while apps come and go, companies come and go. Data is what lasts, and why it's so important to control it. I'd want to use command line tools - or UI's that are just as composable - to manipulate my files. The iPad perspective just seems completely crippled from the POV. Like a toy. Just to take an example - look at the Moon article also on the front page right now: https://medium.com/@sulej.robert/the-moon-made-twice-at-home-a2cb73b3f1e8 https://medium.com/@sulej.robert/the-moon-made-twice-at-home...
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Apple pretty much has acknowledged that, and has been slowly introducing a file system interface over the last several years. If you haven’t looked at an iPad in awhile, you should to refresh your POV. The obvious buildup is to when the iPad transitions to a notebook computer.
chrisseaton 7y ago
You can write on it, draw on it, paint on it, program on it, and you already mentioned video, photography, music, spoken word. Seems like an extremely powerful creation tool to me! You could create many of humanity’s greatest works on it! What are you expecting more?
- drdeadringer 7y ago
  I expect actual control and ownership over those very creations I create. On your iPad, point to where your latest video file is. Show me. Where is it? "On The Cloud"? On the iPad itself? Three clicks deep in some random purpose-specific app separate from the soundtrack file you want to integrate into the video? What about five years from now, can you still access that video however and whenever and wherever you please?

beefhash 7y ago

I'm not sure if this is only an about accessibility to non-tech people. Think about it: You can't get files on your device in a useable format anymore. This means piracy becomes exponentially harder to consume (i.e. you can't use your iPad [easily] as a reader for your pirated ebooks). Quite honestly, that's a stroke of genius and likely a secondary motivation for this workflow.

swiley 7y ago
It’s always been pretty easy to read pirated ebooks on the iPad.
RhodaLs 7y ago
You can very easily use your iPad as a reader for arbitrarily downloaded ebooks. Go to Gutenberg or Archive.org or the pirate site of your choice. Select a book. Select the format. Epubs and PDFs have the option of being sent to iBooks. Mobi can be opened with a compatible reader app if you have one installed. And the file can be saved to Dropbox or whatever file service you have installed. With the latest version of iOS (IpadOS) you can save to your Downloads folder or even to a connected storage device, or to a file share on your local network. You can also load books via Dropbox, local network, or connected storage. I do this all the time. For me, it's convenient to use Dropbox as the intermediary, but there's plenty of other ways too.
htfu 7y ago
What? You can very easily use your iPad as a reader for pirated ebooks. Like, I cannot understand how it could possibly be made smoother than it is. Whether pdf or epub, and whichever device or type of device you use to add the file, once you do it will automatically be stored in your icloud and synced across devices. Same as any purchase.
ubercow13 7y ago
This is not true any more. I can go to a music blog on my iPhone, download a zip of an album to my phone using the Safari download manager, unzip it in place with the core iOS file manager, move the resulting folder into the media library folder for my music player app, and play it on my device. I can later open up the iOS file manager and find the mp3 for my new favourite song in my music player's folder, click Share and send the file to my friend on Telegram or whatever. iPhones are pretty reasonable piracy tools now.

gameswithgo 7y ago

i had a very similar experience and it is infuriating. i can’t believe nobody makes a smartphone that is just a computer. android is closer but its only a half step.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
We're very close with both the Librem 5 and PinePhone in their final development stages. They run actually Linux, and the PinePhone is only $150.
PopePompus 7y ago
Android with termux is a pretty good approximation to a handheld GNU/linux machine. You can access the files created by other apps on the phone, so it's easy to cat text files in your Dropbox area, etc. you can wget files from other machines. You can ssh into the phone from your desktop machine, and then work on the phone with a real keyboard. GNU compilers work on the phone. About the only complaint I have is that I have not found an X11 server app for Android that is useful, and it's not been for lack of looking.
shantly 7y ago
A smartphone that's "just a computer" is probably gonna be pretty bad for most people. Even the more-restrictive Apple App Store has to be constantly on guard against apps trying to get around the rules and spy on users and eat battery for no good reason and other undesirable junk—and not just little fly-by-night scamsters, but Facebook and such. Take away any effort to keep that under control and the experience for most of the non-HN crowd would be awful.

RhodaLs 7y ago

Six years ago it was possible to use Dropbox as the files intermediary. With the current version (13) of iOS, there's a fairly direct access to files. There's a files explorer with support for connections to network shares & external drives. Apple is less interested in abstracting them away as they used to be.

chrisseaton 7y ago

> My first attempt was to SSH into it Come on that’s not a sensible thing to expect from a non-specialist device, is it? I’m not sure this is a reasonable criticism.

benj111 7y ago
> and would require a third-party app store and jailbreak. Maybe not reasonable to expect it built in, I shouldn't have the jailbreak my own device though.
- falcolas 7y ago
  It’s not your device. Or rather, you may own the hardware, but you don’t own the software on the device. You agreed to that in one of the many clickwrap EULAs you were presented with. Now then, don’t you feel so much better? /s
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ACS_Solver 7y ago
Well, sure, I didn't expect it to be running a SSH server right away, but I was hoping to have a SSH option somewhere in the settings or, in the worst case, a downloadable app. It's a power user feature of course, but knowing that it's a Unix-based device, I absolutely expected easy SSH access. Then again, this is something that happened a lot with my brief use of iOS - I would repeatedly find that Apple clearly didn't intend for power user features to be accessed. I have no experience with OS X so don't know if the same applies there.
- htfu 7y ago
  Back in the early jailbreak days I used to run a daemon so I could log in and poke around, but unless you’re developing, well what was your exact use-case? I never found one, it’s not a server. These days I use SSH a ton on my iOS devices through various apps and for many purposes (direct shell access, firing off scripts, port forwarding...) but that’s all logging into machines.

dreamcompiler 7y ago

The original iPod was a Firewire hard drive; you could connect it to your Mac and use it as a backup volume if you wanted. Apple took all that away a long time ago, and obviously it wasn't for technical reasons. It was so Apple could control and restrict how the customer used their devices. One of the many reasons why I changed from an Apple fan to an Apple hater.

Trav5 7y ago
Ha, that's how I got my boss to buy me one. I backed up the server and carried my music around with me. Now I just carry a portable hard drive...
scarface74 7y ago
You were able to use an iPod as a storage device throughout its entire lifetime. If Apple wanted to “control and restrict you” it would have been a lot harder to reverse engineer the iPod indexing format and allow third parties to write software that could store and retrieve music from the iPod.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  At the beginning it was literally just a disk with an HFS+ file system. You could drag files to and from it with the Finder. No reverse engineering necessary.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    You’re talking about two separate things. You could never drag music to the iPod and have it recognized by the music player. You could always drag random files to it and have it work as a hard drive. On Windows it was NTFS (Fat32?) on Macs it was HFS+
    - dreamcompiler 7y ago
      I never mentioned music. I was talking about files in general. And even with music it was easy to drag music files from an iPod; they were merely in a hidden folder. I don't remember trying to drag music to an iPod with the Finder because it used to be so easy to do that with iTunes.

FpUser 7y ago

I was given iPad as a gift some years ago (they also gave a receipt). After playing with it for few hours and discovering that it does not let me do the thing I want I promptly returned it to the store for nice refund ;)

carapace 7y ago

Yeah, the iPad is a shopping mall.

fit2rule 7y ago

I use VLC on my iDevices, and I add media to it pretty easily. The fact that you expected this to work out of the box is interesting - I mean, I agree, it should work that way - but the fact that you can still very much manage your entire Media library on an iPad, user filesystem basis, shouldn't be discarded. You just didn't know you could do that with VLC maybe? (Or FileExplorer, or many of hundreds of other apps ..)

ACS_Solver 7y ago
From what I recall, there was some kind of problem with apps not making use of hardware video decoding. I vaguely remember trying VLC but only getting acceptable performance on Apple's own application without a jailbreak. This is circa 2013 though.
- scarface74 7y ago
  The iPhone 4s and first generation iPad were capable of software transcoding video and playing it.
  - layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
    Parent was talking about not utilizing the hardware video codecs, which is indeed software “transcoding”. It drains your battery like crazy.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  There are countless video players for iOS and most of them will use hardware decoding properly

galad87 7y ago

And then they added the Files app and brought back all the classic file handling. Because it was impossible to work with files siloed inside apps.

scarface74 7y ago

While I agree with the sentiment, it’s a few years out of date. Starting with iOS 8 - 5 years ago, Apple has had extensibility points where third parties like Dropbox and OneDrive could be used to store documents and used in the common places where you would want to save and upload files across apps. - of course the Files app was introduced two years ago. - there have been third party document providers that exposed an ftp server on the device that you could send files from. - apps like VLC expose a web server from your device you can use to upload files. - with iOS 13 you can connect a standard USB device or network file share and it appears within the Files app and any app that supports saving/loading files via the standard APIs - it’s still a sticking point that there is no easy way to add music to your library without going through the iTunes app.

tomc1985 7y ago
Files still doesn't have the concept of a 'home folder' on the local device. I heard they even had this feature in early betas but took it away.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- scarface74 7y ago
  You can download a 3rd party app that lets you use your local storage as a document location. https://medium.com/codezillas/how-to-add-a-local-folder-to-your-iphone-or-ipad-d6c9118e7aed https://medium.com/codezillas/how-to-add-a-local-folder-to-y...
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    No need any more, you can create a folder in the home folder without any link to any particular app
- derefr 7y ago
  You mean the "On My [device]" folder, as referred to here? https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT206481 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT206481

htfu 7y ago

While it didn’t exist back then there’s been an actual file manager for a while now, and long before that files could be downloaded and opened by (hence stored with) apps, and then shared onwards if later settling on a different pdf reader or whatever. Other approaches like using iTunes to transfer files (again, to some specific app), while clunkier and less intuitive than mass storage, still worked. Apps like VLC could spin up a temp web server for file upload, and again if using device to pull from something instead of pushing from eg desktop to it, a lot of scripting and automation has been possible, essentially piping data and files between apps. So at its core I think it’s more about having a very app-centric approach, including leaving it up to apps whether (and how) to work at file level. Not exactly helping but hardly preventing either. Of course being accessible, nudging people towards sourcing their media through Apple etc are factors here, but there’s more to it than just limitations, and it hasn’t really been as heavy-handed or locked-down as many seem to think. Edit: whoops, started writing this before the other posts mentioning the same things, then returned and finished without refreshing. Oh well.

rsync 7y ago

"The iPad is strongly tied to the workflow that Apple suggests, and that's a workflow that removes files as a concept, abstracting them away. It's quite possibly a genius approach in terms of how accessible it is to non-tech people, even though it doesn't sit right with me." I ran into the same thing when I acquired an iphone. After moving all of my music files to the iphone (with itunes, etc.) - look at this picture: https://www.ilounge.com/assets/images/articles_tagging/2011/34.jpg https://www.ilounge.com/assets/images/articles_tagging/2011/... SO many choices ... and what is missing ? filename This comes into play when you have uncompressed, raw rips (WAV/PCM) of CDs which have no metadata - there is nothing but the filename.