Lukas Mathis have an interesting analysis:
This is a sentiment you often hear from people: casual users only need “entry-level” performance. Even casual users themselves perpetuate it: “Oh, I’m not doing much on my computer, so I always just go with the cheapest option.” And then they buy a horrid, underpowered netbook, find out that it has a tiny screen, is incredibly slow, the keyboard sucks, and they either never actually use it, or eventually come to the conclusion that they just hate computers.
In reality, it’s exactly backwards: proficient users can deal with a crappy computer, but casual users need as good a computer as possible.
Computer housekeeping is still a complicated matter for any regular people to deal with, heck, even for a proficient user. Even with iOS which is a blank slate of an OS, Apple clearly pushing hard to get rid of the file system, and yet still not achieve the level of simplicity and ease of use they desire.
There’s still a lot of complexity we have to deal with using a computer, any computers, why? Because it’s multipurpose device. Consider a smartphone, it’s a phone, a camera, a calendaring device, an internet browser, an email device, a gaming device, and anything that an app can offer, on top of that it got plenty of sensors, gyro, proximity, light, GPS, and you name it, in short it’s a darn complex computer.
The challenge is how to make it more simple? You can’t just mindlessly reduce or hide the complexity and call it a day, because simplicity is not the absence of clutter, simplicity is not so simple to achieve.