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Put the mouse down and step backwards. Slowly. Keep your hands where I can see them, Mr Apple Engineer.

You thought you could mess with the most important bit of our Macs and we'd never notice. Well, you've been found out. We've read the rumours, heard the excited chatter, seen the job ads for software engineers. We know what you're up to and we don't like it. Not one bit.

'The Finder team is seeking an energetic, motivated software engineer to help develop the next-generation versions of the Finder.' Yes, that sounded innocuous enough. It was the reference to it being the 'notorious file browser' for Mac OS X that gave you away.

You see, we like the Finder. We like its elegant simplicity, the options it gives us, the style and grace with which it lets us zip around our files and drives. If you could just sort out that whole column thing and improve

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the FTP it would be nigh on perfect. Making it less 'notorious' will require some serious underpinning, and we devoted users of OS X won't like that one bit. Not one bit at all. We're Luddites, you see.

It's not like you haven't done it before. iSync was perfect once. It worked like a dream, updating all our devices with just one click, and saving our contacts and dates to .Mac to boot. And then along came Tiger with its centralised syncing framework and it all went to pot. Now we have to look in three different directions to keep our data safe, all in the name of 'progress'.

You see, to you the Finder is just part of OS, but to us, the end users, it's everything. We don't care what clever processes are running underneath, or how many subroutines you've optimised to make Core Image that little bit snappier. The Finder is like the steering wheel of a car, handle of a teapot, lace of a shoe. It's the first thing that comes to mind when we think of OS X. It doesn't have the glamour of iPhoto, and it's not as fun as iPhoto, but it's still the ace in your pack. Don't forget that.

Then again, how many times have we begged you not to do something that you've then gone and done, only to find we love it after all? Countless. So perhaps I'm being harsh.

Please, though, look before you leap, ask before you decide, and remember that while we love what you do, no-one likes a radical change, particularly not when the subject is 'notorious'.