A Lion Falls from the Apple Tree and Kills Folders

Yesterday, Apple released a new MacBook Air, a new Mac Mini, and a substantially redesigned Operating System called OSX Lion.

This was mostly a predictable software/hardware update—mostly.

Computers get faster. Moore’s Law says power for smartphones, digital cameras and, oh, yeah, computers, doubles every two years.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore was talking about transistor counts on a chip, but the idea still applies.

So what's changing for Apple? Its core operating system. And that may not be as flashy as a new iPhone model, but it means a lot underneath the hood.

Apple has a long history of innovations in the consumer computer industry: the graphical user interface, the mouse, the all-in-one computer, the iPod, the iPhone.

In OSX Lion, Apple has begun to kill computer folders, and with them the very way we store information.

Let me explain.

When you store a computer file, it goes into a "folder." It's been like that since the first graphic-based computers—think the early '90s.

Folders work in computers and file cabinets the same way. You pick an order (alphabetical, numerical, chronological) and dig in to find what you're after.

Through the '90s, we got better at searching through these folders—a bit better. So we were navigating these big file cabinets with increased efficiency, but there were serious limitations. To control our information, we needed to follow one of those antiquated systems that have been with us for several thousand years—letters, numbers, dates.

That kind of thinking is great for computers, less so for humans. Remember the date of your last car wash? How about the 1,350th photo you stored on your computer?

There has been a quiet evolution in computing over the last 20 years: relational databases.

Relational databases have been around since the early days of computing, but they are highly inefficient, so it took significant improvements in hardware to make them available to the typical user.

Relational databases work much the way we work.

When we think about our “mothers,” most likely we don’t think about “moths” and “Mott’s Applesauce,” but a computer following an alphabetic system does.

No, we have a host of emotions, a flood of memories, maybe colors or vacations, a favorite meal, her absence, her constant approval, whatever. We work relationally.

And that's the direction Apple's computers are heading.

To learn how, read Sunday night at 6 p.m.

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