I am not sure how much of that really applies here, this seems like a simple arithmetic bug.
Yes, the unwashed masses were just getting past the nerd factor of the Internet, but it wasn’t that bad for software distribution.
The experience of using a mobile phone, on the other hand, was brutal. If you wanted to get a new feature enabled on your device, you’d only be able to take it to a retail outlet of your phone provider.
My specific examples were (1) getting a firmware update on a Nokia 6188 to enable access to the 800 MHz band of the provider’s then-restructured CDMA network; and (2) same for a CDMA Blackberry to enable EVDO data.
What? The 68k to PPC transition was from 1994 to 1998 (versions 7.1.2 to 8.1). The NeXTSTEP-derived Mac OS X (which uses .app bundles rather than resource forks) was released in 2001; though there were betas and developer releases as early as 1997, the OS transition is still distinct from the 68k to PPC transition and there were quite a few PPC-only releases of the pre-OS X Mac OS.
There certainly were during the PPC to Intel transition. This happened in 2005 with "Tiger", and at that time OS X had already been receiving updates over the Internet since quite some time.