People LOVE to notice new behavior in Apple hardware and software and liken it to an Orwellian future in which Apple is harshly dictating what you may and may not do with your computer. Maybe you have looked at a new Mac machine with less IO than before and cringed, or you saw that documents are auto saved in Lion and you worry that the experience is being dumbed down for you. If so, you failed to grasp just what the Orwellian future of PCs looked like sans Mac.
Apple was referring not only to IBM, but also the notion that the computer was a complex device that used arcane keyboard commands to accomplish things. These early computers required that you have more knowledge about the inner workings of it than you may really perhaps need. To save a file back then, for instance, you needed to know the full name of a file path, and possibly also the names of some commands. But with the GUI, this was no longer needed. You could traverse something that you could recognize as a human and put your file in this sort of metaphysical location. You didn’t need to know the name of a file path.
The concept of auto save is similar here. Truthfully, the computer is very much capable of tracking your changes and saving them off. In fact, it’s less likely to forget about doing it than you are, you easily distracted buffoon! By handling the saving of files for you, you are freed from the burden of thinking about managing your own file and now you can focus more on the task at hand. You are no longer enslaved by the dogma of having to save frequently that you once had. Is some flexibility lost here? Yes, but it’s useless flexibility.
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