I was hoping Be OS would be the OS that Apple would pick when it failed at writing it's own new OS. But noooooo, they had to pick NeXT, and bring back Steve Jobs, and the rest is history. Apple is still about tech, to a degree. But not like the days when Apple was a great tech company. Now Apple seems to be more about fashion.
> Apple is still about tech, to a degree. But not like the days when Apple was a great tech company. Now Apple seems to be more about fashion.
I don't think that's true. Apple is a lot more mass market than they used to be, but the tech that goes into their products is quite advanced. For example, the iPad Pro benchmarks that put Apple's CPU in the same class as the Intel CPU used in MacBook Pros is pure tech. There's nothing fashionable about a CPU.
Apple's Face ID recently passed a hacking test that other facial recognition systems failed. The latest Apple Watch has an ECG. Perhaps health is fashionable, but that's also tech built into a tiny product.
Apple's camera tech consistently scores near the top of the pack.
I'm not arguing their products are perfect or anything of that sort. I just don't think it's fair to characterize Apple as being more about fashion than tech, because I think they're quite busy pushing tech forward on mass market products.
Having both a BeOS box and NeXTSTEP box at the time, I was pretty glad they picked NeXT. I love BeOS, but NeXTSTEP was the superior OS on the whole including development story. BeOS had some really great line items, but it had some big holes too. Be just didn't have the time to get it all done.
That being said, I do wish Haiku well because I get the feeling that it really could be great.
One of the big marks against BeOS in that fight was the lack of printer support. That sort of thing still mattered in 1996-1997.
I don’t know. A BeOS-based MacOS would’ve been ready for prime time years before Mac OS X was. And one suspects the Finder would have been usable. But there would be no iPhone.
A BeOS-based MacOS would’ve been ready for prime time years before Mac OS X was.
I'm not so sure. NeXTSTEP was pretty stable. I get the feeling that a lot of the delay had little to do with NeXTSTEP and much more to do with Apple and Adobe/Microsoft. Plus, the development environment was no where near as good on BeOS.
