Yesterday Microsoft released a video showing off the new interface for Windows 8. My first impression was that Microsoft was making a bold move and hoping they could pull it off. But the brief demo of Excel gave me fear that underneath all of the nice UI nothing had changed. Would Windows have a split personality? Old style apps seem to relegated to a ghetto.

Today, that fear grows. Ars Technica reported that Microsoft revealed some hardware specs.

To get the new interface, tablets will have to offer a resolution of at least 1024x768. Anything lower and they will be stuck with a derivative of the classic Windows 7 shell. Increasing the resolution from the 4:3 1024x768 to the 16:9 1366x768 will additionally enable the “snap” side-by-side multitasking view that was demonstrated.

It seems clear that they view the new UI as an extra, not part of the core OS. MS continues to create tiered experiences for Windows. I wonder what percentage of users will receive the “full” Windows 8 experience?

Jesper at Waffle posted about Apple and their Windows apps. I’d been meaning to give this some thought and list my annoyances with how Apple software behaves differently on Windows. I think this sums it up:

Apple knows how to behave on their own platform. When I talk to Windows-using friends, Apple is legendary for being bad Windows citizens. I do not think that’s the case myself. iTunes, for example, is often brought up as a slow resource hog, something that I never saw after the initial dog-slow iTunes 4.1 or the initial dog-slow Safari 1.0 beta. (Maybe Apple’s Windows QA leaves something to be desired.) But Apple’s certainly not doing their best to be a good Windows citizen.