That was for a permanent and reliable shift in architecture across the board. Apple knew that the new machines all had the same architecture since Apple makes all their own hardware, and this emulation layer was only to allow older software to operate while application developers got a version designed for the new architecture to market. At that point, if you wrote software for the Mac, you moved to the new architecture.

I'm not convinced that the same story will play out for Microsoft. There are so many companies producing x86 and x86_64 machines that to coordinate them all to begin producing ARM machines instead would be a difficult, protracted, and expensive venture. I would expect it to take far longer than Apple's relatively recent transition from PPC to Intel given the number of players in the coordination. I doubt the software vendors will begin producing ARM software en masse until ARM hardware is prevalent, delaying the process even further.

I think we'll end up with multiple, fairly incompatible versions of Windows for each architecture until it's clear whether or not ARM is really going to take hold on the the desktop.

The difference there is that iOS and Mac OS X have different names. If Apple came out with "Apple OS" for all their devices (desktop, laptop, iPad, iPhone, etc.) and released "Pages for Apple OS", then it would cause the same problem that the parent is noting. As it stands, there is a pretty clear distinction that the iOS and OS X version of Pages are not interchangeable, and I have yet to encounter anyone that couldn't figure out why.

I always think of Labor Day as the end of summer, and thus the beginning of autumn. The pools close for the season, it starts to get a little less humid around that time here in the DC area, and all the kids are back in school. Sounds like fall to me.

I have an AMD processor that is roughly equivalent to a P4 that can run Windows 7 easily on a gig of RAM.

I think the key there is "a gig of RAM". I might be wrong (I've never actually installed anything above XP on any of my machines), but as I understand it insufficient RAM is the biggest culprit for performance problems in Vista and above. Mine has 512 MB, which XP is perfectly content with.

I have yet to see a system that could effectively run XP that couldn't also run Windows 7.

Really? Because I'm fairly certain the P4 w/ 512MB of RAM and an integrated Intel video card that I have at home won't run Windows 7 anywhere near "effective". XP Pro runs without any noticeable slowdowns, even when watching Flash video (YouTube, Hulu, etc.).

More topically, I would wager that the average person has no idea the difference between 2.5G, 3G, EDGE, or regular voice access. Non-technical people are just going to see two maps and notice that the red one has a lot more red than the blue one has blue. I'm not sure the fine print at the bottom of those ads stating that voice coverage is different is even large enough to be readable unless you have an HDTV.

If I remember correctly, Windows NT 4 (maybe Windows 95/98 too) was version 4 and Windows XP was version 5. More versioning info is here on Wikipedia.

... People who might be working on a Mac or some kind of *nix box. ...

MS Office is available for Mac as well, and has been for nearly a decade. It's even available at the Apple Store when you buy a Mac. The *nix install base is really the compatibility problem, although (as mentioned several times above) OpenOffice has rendered that nearly non-existent.

It's not just previous generations that prefer tube amps to transistors. The differences are not obvious until you try to overdrive them, at which point they break up very differently. Tube amps distort with a lot of coloring overtones that you just don't get from a transistor amp, which tends to sound crunchy and just plain distorted. The advantage of transistors is reliability as tubes will eventually blow out and need replacing. When I play my guitar, I almost always use tube amps for recording and personal playing for pleasure due to the better sound, but I usually use a solid-state amp for gigging due to the reliability.

The difference is that the various versions of Ubuntu (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, etc.) are actually different and not the same thing with different features disabled. People who like Gnome will run Ubuntu, those who like KDE will run Kubuntu, older hardware will run Xubuntu for lower memory usage (or people who just like XFCE), Edubuntu comes bundled with education-specific software that is only useful (for the most part) to educators and students, and on down the line. Other than having useful features disabled in the cheaper versions, I can't see any appreciable difference between the different versions of Windows the way there is in the different versions of Ubuntu.

It's also worth noting that though the installer seems to work well, there is no "Uninstall" option, either in the KDE folder in the Start Menu or a KDE item that can be removed from Add/Remove Programs. I installed it on my XP box here at work to play around with it and I saw what I wanted to see to satisfy my curiousity, and I'm not sure how to go about getting rid of it (save just deleting C:\Program Files\KDE, which may or may not actually delete everything). I understand that this is pre-release, beta software, but there still ought to be a way to uninstall it.