I think the fact that Palm's technology was designed for mobile and NeXT's wasn't turned out to be a huge advantage in the long run. If Apple had planned to bu

I think the fact that Palm's technology was designed for mobile and NeXT's wasn't turned out to be a huge advantage in the long run. If Apple had planned to build the iPhone in 1996, they probably would have bought Palm and ended up with something a far cry short of the iPhone as we know it, for obvious reasons. Palm's OS was designed for what mobile hardware was capable of in the 90s, whereas NeXT's OS was designed for what workstation hardware was capable of in the 90s. By the time the iPhone was released, Moore's Law had made mobile hardware capable of running the superior NeXT software (full unix kernel under the hood, Objective-C and its APIs, etc.) and you end up with a better end product.