This is an article that will have a short shelf life. On October 20th, you’ll witness Apple’s first public demonstration of the next great version of Mac OS X, code-named Lion. That this may be the true “king of the beasts,” in keeping with the name, may mean that there will be huge changes.

All I can say is that it’s about time.

You see, there have been lingering problems with the Mac OS that essentially afflict all graphical operating systems. But since the Mac was the leader of the pack, more or less, many of its fundamental (and troublesome) file management conventions have simply been imitated with minor changes in other OS, especially Microsoft Windows.

While the file and folder method may seem utterly simple and intuitive to many of you, I cannot tell you how many people remain flummoxed by Mac file management, not to mention the permissions issues the OS inherited from its Unix core.

Consider a recent episode involving a client, a professional photographer, who had her data recovered after the hard drive in an old Power Mac G4 failed.

Now the recovery process was pretty straightforward and it did appear that all of her files — at least the ones she needed and failed to back up — were intact and copied to a portable drive. But the permissions were “wonky,” as it were. Every other folder was inaccessible unless she changed access permissions via Get Info. That involved manually entering her password each time.

Yes, I grant there are shareware utilities that can do batch file permission changes, but there weren’t enough critical folders to access to warrant such a solution. However, you’d think that permissions issues would be few and far between on a world-class operating system. Mac users shouldn’t have to spend a moment dealing with such matters. The operating system needs to manage such disparities behind the scenes.

Indeed when it comes to working “behind the scenes,” the confusing task of handling files and folders should be on the top of the list among the features that need to be changed for the 21st century.

Certainly Apple has moved very far in the other direction with the iOS, which is, as you know, based on the very same Unix core as Mac OS X. So far as anyone can see, there is no file system to deal with. That level of simplicity can present all sorts of complications in its own right, simply because you don’t have any built-in method on your iOS device to manage the files created with any of the iWork apps, or, for that matter, other productivity software, except within the app itself. There’s no doubt an app for that, but Apple needs to move slightly in the other direction towards real file management.

Certainly, the interfaces if iPhoto and iTunes provide a neat method of file handling. You can get the photos, music or videos you want without having to consider where they’re located. Setting up a playlist, or a photo album, is the closest equivalent of the traditional folder, and is meant to serve essentially the same purpose. Since the Finder has taken on more and more of the characteristics of iTunes, making it easy to manage your stuff is an important next step.

Yes, I grant that Smart Folders helps, although their existence isn’t apparent unless you look at the Finder’s Sidebar or pay attention to the Help screens about creating them.

Here’s a typical example of how the situation gets crazy: As you probably know, many Mac users aren’t aware that there’s such a thing as an Open dialog box. When I say “choose Open from the File menu,” I’ll often get strange looks. Far too many of you simply double-click your files from a Finder window to open them, even if the app that created those programs is already running.

When it comes to saving a file, just where does it go? Yes, you can make that decision in the Save dialog, but far too many Mac users simply OK whatever default location is presented, then wonder where that file went. So suddenly Spotlight is called into action, and that shouldn’t be necessary.

Instead of giving the Finder the bi-annual shave and haircut, Apple ought to rethink and simplify file system management. You shouldn’t have to think about where your files are located, or how to access them. They should be readily available at your beck and call.

I suppose Apple had the right idea with the Simple Finder of the Classic Mac OS, or perhaps the Launcher, both of which clearly inspired Microsoft in building Windows Mobile 7. But what’s really needed is a sophisticated file system that stays virtually invisible to everyone but the power user who craves a “Classic” interface. For the rest of us, present the files in an orderly fashion, categorized the way you want, without considering the abstract of folders and subfolders and all the rest of that old fashioned misery.

Before I go on, I do not pretend to have a final answer to this problem. Maybe Apple can be inspired by some of the Finder substitute apps out there, but I rather think they have enough brilliant programmers in house who can deliver a file management scheme that is simple, elegant, and finally takes the Mac Finder into the 21st century.

I’d like to see such a solution in Mac OS 10.7. I want to be amazed, but if it doesn’t happen, you can bet I’ll be lobbying for the Finder of the future in 10.8.

I have to tell you, my friends, that I do not pretend to be expert at prognostication, certainly not when it comes to assessing Apple’s possible future behavior. So when I read about the next Apple “Back to the Mac” media event, scheduled on Wednesday, October 20 (my late father’s birthday, I might add), I was somewhat surprised. That announcement definitely came out of left field.

Knowing the topic of discussion opens up ripe possibilities for speculation, and they’d have to be major to warrant the decision to summon the media to Apple’s Cupertino, CA campus for the morning session.

At the top of the list of potential hardware introductions is a serious revision to the MacBook Air. This thin and light portable has been a poor slave to the rest of the MacBook lineup, having not had an update since last year. Starting at $1,499, it is also regarded as overpriced, underpromoted, and not a barn burner when it comes to sales.

The speculation about the update is fairly consistent across the board: It will be lighter and thinner, weighing less than three pounds and sporting an 11.6-inch display, compared to the 13.3-inch display featured in the current edition. The processor may be another low-power Intel chip, or perhaps represent Apple’s first foray into installing AMD parts, other than their graphics chips.

The price of admission is one huge question mark. With more and more cheap Windows note-books out there, Apple can’t justify a price that’s actually higher than a decently equipped MacBook Pro. So I expect the biggest surprise of all may be that the Late 2010 MacBook Air will cost between $799 and $899.

When you consider how aggressively Apple priced the iPad, up to the point where competitors, caught flat-footed, cannot hope to compete, such a cheap price makes a lot of sense. More to the point, Apple, now reportedly the third largest PC maker in the U.S., may move loads of them this holiday season, perhaps cannibalizing sales of the MacBook to some degree.

The iPad won’t be impacted, since it appears to exist in a universe all by itself. The real victims of the iPad’s incredible success appear to be netbooks and entry-level PC note-books, although some say it’s just another gadget, and doesn’t impact any traditional PC product.

But Apple isn’t going to summon the media just to introduce a single new Mac. Even adding some minor revisions to the MacBook and MacBook Pro lineups doesn’t justify such an event. There has to be more, and the next level of speculation speaks of new versions of iLife and iWork. The former will have the requisite changes, such as being compiled as a true 64-bit app, with the possibility that iDVD will be history, and iWeb will receive a major upgrade.

As far as I’m concerned, the loss of iDVD doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Even though more and more people have given up on physical media, I still think making your own DVD serves a valuable purpose, from home videos to product demonstrations. Even if the app gets a minor shave and haircut, it doesn’t make sense to drop it. But Apple is notorious for dropping features or entire products, unlike most other tech companies who can’t contemplate discontinuing anything, unless there’s a replacement at hand.

With the impending release of Office 2011 for the Mac, it also makes sense to expect a new edition of iWork, perhaps with greater integration with the iPad version. I wouldn’t presume to speculate on the new capabilities of the iWork suite, other than more powerful number-crunching capabilities in Numbers that bring it closer to Excel.

On the whole, I like iWork, though I find that Pages could run faster. I’m also concerned that, after you print a Pages document, you have to click Save before quitting. That makes no sense if you haven’t changed anything in the document, and I wonder why this irritating little defect remains unfixed.

But the real heavy-duty speculation speaks of Apple’s plans to offer a preview of the next version of Mac OS X, 10.7, which will clearly get the designation “Lion.” How do we know? Well, the invitation to the event displays a lion peering out from a stylized Apple logo. There would be no other conceivable purpose to put it there, not even to indicate that Apple is getting a lion’s share of business in some market segments. Remember, it’s all about the Mac.

Speculation about what 10.7 might deliver is all over the place. The possible release date will probably range from spring of 2011 to next summer. The latter might be more sensible, since it would give developers a reasonable amount of time to examine the betas, ensure compatibility with their products, and add support for 10.7’s new features. Also, having it arrive after a WWDC gives Apple the opportunity to schedule workshops so developers can have access to the final betas and get assistance from Apple.

It would also afford Apple an opportunity to begin a major marketing push, past the expected release of the next version of the iOS.

With this media event coming two days after what many believe to be news of another blowout quarter for Apple, you almost wonder how long it’ll take the stock price to hit the magic $400 mark.

As Windows 7 receives surprisingly favorable reviews from the tech media, I have to wonder why there are so few critical comments about Microsoft’s ongoing claims of innovative products that are actually imitative.

Take the infamous ribbon that has graced recent versions of Office for Windows and the Mac. That it’s a context-sensitive toolbar — changing based on the function you’re using — is supposedly a unique or at least innovative feature. But that’s absurd. There have been a number of other applications over the years, including CorelDRAW for the Mac (no longer being developed or supported) that offered toolbars of that sort. And let’s not forget Adobe InDesign, where the toolbar also changes depending on which tool or function you select. So what makes the ribbon so different? Larger icons?

Microsoft sure has a strange concept of innovation.

With Windows 7, Microsoft’s “innovation” is the use of tiles and hubs rather than icons and folders. Indeed, when you look at the Home screen, you might recall the clear resemblance to some of those Mac OS launching docks, such as the original Launcher from the Classic Mac OS.

I suppose Microsoft ought to be congratulated for building an interface that doesn’t look like another iPhone knock-off. But when Microsoft pulls a stunt of this sort, they risk making it more difficult for customers to become acclimated to the OS. Ditching standard menu bars in Windows 7 for their own apps was another foolish decision that, while surely a different approach, hardly made for a more productive environment.

As far as the handset makers are concerned, the first crop of Windows 7 smartphones appear to be little different from the Android OS gear the same companies already build. The biggest change is the OS, which surely reduces development costs.

The problem is that, once again, Microsoft may have a decent enough product, but they fail to travel new roads. Using a tile rather than an icon doesn’t count. They haven’t actually rethought the concept of smartphone interfaces in a way that makes the product functionally superior to existing devices, and you’d think that’s what Microsoft had to do in order to salvage the Windows Mobile platform.

Even cut, copy and paste isn’t supported, although it will supposedly be added some time next year. But that’s Microsoft’s way, which is to introduce something that is inferior in some ways to the competition, but then boast that hey’ll remedy that shortcoming in the future. That may have worked in the PC operating system space, but the smartphone business is moving too fast. The competition will be busy adding new features next year, just as Microsoft struggles to offer what you could get this year.

This doesn’t mean that the spate of Windows 7 smartphones arriving this holiday season can’t or won’t succeed. It sure seems that Microsoft will back the products with plenty of high-power advertising, and the same is probably true for their largest domestic carrier, AT&T.

For companies that have previously deployed Windows Mobile gear, or are otherwise heavily invested in Microsoft products, such as Exchange Server, I suppose there will be a perceived advantage in buying up batches of the new smartphones. That is, after they run them in test environments to make sure they actually operate satisfactorily, and provide the requisite level of security.

Since Windows 7 is a version 1.0 product, you can also expect that there will be early release bugs of one sort or another, although that won’t be clear until the final shipping products are reviewed in the next few weeks.

The best I can say, absent a thorough examination of the shipping product, is that Microsoft is at least trying to appear different, and offer the veneer of innovation. In the end, the marketplace will decide whether it’s a case of being too little and too late.

Remember that in 2011, iOS 5 will be available, along with several interim upgrades to the Android OS. There will also be revisions to RIM’s BlackBerry software, and other updates. If Microsoft is still struggling to add last year’s features into their mobile OS, they may indeed suffer the same fate that they confronted with the Zune.

As you recall, the Zune digital media player was also a perfectly good product, with a snazzy interface and decent performance. But Microsoft’s concept of social networking, “Join the Social,” was another symptom of the pathetic efforts of a company that was utterly clueless about how young people actually interact online.

Time will tell whether tiles and hubs will prove to be demonstrably better than icons and folders, or whether just being different ends up being just another bad idea from Microsoft. And they’ve had far too many of those in recent years.

In the end, Microsoft may actually be better off shedding their consumer division, and selling it off to someone who truly understands the business. There’s still plenty of cash to be made from traditional PC and server software, although that is a market that will be sharply reduced in the years to come.

Or maybe Microsoft should just give back the money to the shareholders and close up shop. But didn’t someone say the very same thing about Apple some years ago?

You have to expect that Apple can do no wrong — with the possible exception of the lame response to the original complaints about the iPhone 4’s notorious grip of death. The stock price continues to hit record numbers, and industry analysts are falling over themselves trying to come up with higher and higher estimates for iPhone, iPad and, of course, Mac sales.

While PC sales didn’t grow as fast as the industry hoped this summer, it may well be that Apple had blowout numbers of new Macs. I’ve seen estimates from the low three million range, hardly a record, to the mid-four million plateau.

Consider that, ten years ago, Apple was lucky to best 300,000 Macs a quarter, and you can see how fast the the platform has grown, even though, for the most part, promotional efforts appear to have been largely dormant. The cute and funny Mac versus PC campaign is history, and new Macs are usually heralded with little more than a press release, and perhaps a few quick interviews by Apple executives.

Add to that the fact that the Mac OS was barely on the radar during the last WWDC, and you can well understand why some tech rabble-rousers began to predict that Mac’s best days were history, that the platform had plateaued, and it will be all downhill from here on.

When it comes to Apple, Inc., the analysts and the pundits almost always “misunderestimate” the company, which is truly unfortunate, because they lose their credibility.

As far as the Mac platform is concerned, consider that Microsoft is spending loads of money with those perfectly stupid ads that do little but demonstrate that the most compelling feature of Windows 7 is the ability to pin documents in the corners of the screen. I suspect most people, when confronted with those ads, might wish for a DVR so they can Fast Forward (assuming they don’t have one), or would prefer to simply change the channel.

At one time, it was believed that the state of the economy would convince people to buy cheaper gear. That may explain the initial attraction of netbooks until, of course, people actually used them, and realized they were poor substitutes for full-fledged note-books. Many of the cheap PC desktops that get top reviews from Consumer Reports are provably unsuitable for anything but basic tasks; you need powerful hardware for “real” work, and suddenly Macs aren’t so expensive after all.

Now to be perfectly honest, I do not pretend to know if the current PC sales slowdown is due to the state of the economy, buyer’s remorse, a combination of these reasons, or none of them. At the same time, Apple continues to defy gravity. With minimal promotion, Macs continue to sell extremely well.

Of course, that doesn’t explain the wide variation of the projected sales figures. I would hope that industry analysts are performing or consulting some sort of sampling from Mac dealers just to see how fast the boxes are moving off the shelves. Otherwise, their figures, even if some turn out to be close to the mark, are worth next to nothing. Tea leaves — or tossing darts in the air — would work as well.

Assuming Macs just completed a blow-out quarter, ostensibly due to the back-to-school promotions, not to mention the release of new desktops, you have to wonder when the online chatter will return in full force to Apple’s “first” product lineup.

For example, what’s happening with the MacBook Air, which hasn’t received an update since last year? Some rumor sites are reporting that dealer supplies are limited, something that usually occurs when a model refresh is in the offing. What’s more, Apple has a history of releasing hardware upgrades in October, which may also portend a possible minor refresh for the MacBook and MacBook Pro.

If the MacBook Air doesn’t simply vanish, you wonder where it might be positioned, in light of the tremendous success of the iPad. Other than the extremely thin and light form factor, the MacBook Air is a poor cousin to the far cheaper MacBook. Is saving a pound or two worth the extra cost?

One report has it that Apple is readying an 11.6-inch version, but at what price point? All things being equal, a smaller display ought to mean a device that’s actually cheaper than the MacBook. Indeed, if a revised MacBook Air hit the scales at $799 or $899 per copy, that might present a tremendous boost to holiday sales.

The iPad exists in a separate universe, so it may not impact sales of that product. On the other hand, a cheaper Mac might cannibalize sales from the regular MacBook, although a sale is a sale. In the end, the smaller screen might be too small for some users, but would represent a potential sales goldmine, particularly for folks upgrading from netbooks who don’t have iPads in their sites.

The biggest mistake, I think, would be for Apple to price a revitalized MacBook Air way above $1,000. That may deliver decent profits, but unit sales would remain modest.

Regardless, I’m more curious than ever to see how the Mac sales numbers pan out, and we’ll all know next week when Apple spills the beans.