@Boudicca:
"biggest insults" oh come now let's not get petty! Or would you rather Amiga was beaten to death by IBM's little minions?
Although the irony does not escape me, but it doesn't stop there. Of course there was also the Apple Macintosh that also ran on 68k, migrated to PPC and managed to survive with a respectable share of the market only finally to admit that they had to migrate again to the dreaded x86. Now Microsoft has stated that Windows 8 will be available for ARM, and how willing will Apple be to put its customers through another platform shift? Apple will be out on a limb clinging to x86 while Windows jumps ship to the Neo-Archimedes!
Actually Mac OS X handles various processor technologies pretty well thanks to its NEXT heritage. The PPC to Intel switch was reasonably painless for users since they didn't have to figure out which executable binaries to download. That removes the burden from the user in having to figure out which version of an application to download. XCODE will compile universal binaries pretty seamlessly. The same is true for 32-bit versus 64-bit OS X software. Developers just compiles universal "fat" binaries and Mac OS X figures out which to run based on processor architecture. The same would be true if Apple decided to switch to ARM. Apple uses the same approach for both OS X and iOS.
There have been rumors for some time that Apple has been testing their Macbook Air with their "A-series" ARM processors that power the iPad and iPhone, but I think it'll be several more years before ARM is powerful enough to be a serious desktop contender. That doesn't mean they won't devote R&D resources and keep experimenting with it though.
