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I remember thinking it was a terrible decision at the time too. It's hard to even imagine how different the world would look today if they'd gone for BeOS; I th

by dilap 9y ago

I remember thinking it was a terrible decision at the time too. It's hard to even imagine how different the world would look today if they'd gone for BeOS; I think Apple would almost certainly have died or been acquired, and we'd all probably still be using a mix of feature phones and whatever craziness Blackberry was up to. (BeOS was really sweet though! So damn snappy. Even on way way way more powerful hardware today, macOS is still not generally snappy. It's a shame.)

waddlesplash 9y ago
Haiku is still "damn snappy", whether on a 15-year-old Athlon XP or the latest Core i7 (neither of which BeOS will even boot on). You should give it a try sometime :-)
cmrdporcupine 9y ago
The whole "Apple needed to buy an OS to be saved" thing was always hogwash -- they bought NeXT under the auspices of "just" porting OpenStep to PowerPC and Mac-ifying it ... but in reality that took them 5 years to accomplish. I'm pretty sure that in 5 years pre-Jobs Apple could have shipped the Copland project, which had reached Developer Release status just prior to Jobs coming on board and its cancellation. I don't think NeXT brought anything tech wise to Apple that Apple couldn't have done already. In reality it was a Steve Jobs/Avi Tevanian coup that led to the mass layoff of a whole lot of people and the garbage binning of a lot of good tech (Newton, OpenDoc, Dylan just to name a few). In any case if not for the iPod/iPhone/iTunes jump, Apple would probably be dead by now. They were in trouble until the revenue and brand cachet from that started to roll in. What I mean to say by this is: Apple needed neither BeOS or NeXTstep. They needed urgently management discipline and to ship the decent tech they already had. Jobs came on board and provided discipline, killed a bunch of expenses, and kept a lifeline going through the iMac sales, but wasted that money on the OS X transition when they probably could have just finished Copland in that time. But hey, I wasn't there, so...
- dilap 9y ago
  Yeah, definitely, the focus that Jobs' provided was far more important than the tech. I doubt Copland was going anywhere, though, no matter how much time they gave it. The underlying tech of NextStep was just so much better than the classic macOS assembly/pascal, cooperative-multi-tasking, single-memory-sapce, GetNextEvent() universe. Just too hard a problem to try to modernize while still so closely tied to MacOS in your mind...they needed to make a clean break.
  - cmrdporcupine 9y ago
    My understanding after reading a bunch of articles (now I'm an expert!) is that what became 'Carbon' in OSX was based in part on work done for Copland. And that API maintained reasonable good classic compatibility (at the source / API level) while modernizing it a whole bunch. And it shipped quite quickly after the coup, so it must have been based on something existing prior to it. But such was the politics of Apple under Jobs/Tevanian that the (quite esoteric by industry standards) Cocoa/Objective-C ecosystem was considered superior and Carbon was actively deprecated despite being quite successful with third party developers...
    - dilap 9y ago
      Sure, Obj-C was esoteric, but also well-designed and impressively ahead of its time. Witness that a minor evolution of the same tech went on to form the foundation of iOS. Even now, with Apple trying to transition to Swift, it's unclear to me that's an overall win. The combination of C plus message-passing was inspired. So basically I agree Cocoa was better tech than Carbon. Carbon was popular with devs 'cuz that's what they were used to, and that's what their existing apps were written in...it was a great stop-gap measure, but wouldn't have provided nearly as good a foundation for the future (in my opinion).
      - cmrdporcupine 9y ago
        I dunno, after doing iOS development for two years, I was very unimpressed with ecosystem. The UI toolkit is actually surprisingly low level for what it is. But it has served Apple well overall I suppose. I think ObjC is a terrible language tho.
lern_too_spel 9y ago
Android was started to compete with Microsoft in mobile. It still would have existed and likely still would have attained dominant market share.

by dilap 9y ago

waddlesplash 9y ago

Haiku is still "damn snappy", whether on a 15-year-old Athlon XP or the latest Core i7 (neither of which BeOS will even boot on). You should give it a try sometime :-)

cmrdporcupine 9y ago

The whole "Apple needed to buy an OS to be saved" thing was always hogwash -- they bought NeXT under the auspices of "just" porting OpenStep to PowerPC and Mac-ifying it ... but in reality that took them 5 years to accomplish. I'm pretty sure that in 5 years pre-Jobs Apple could have shipped the Copland project, which had reached Developer Release status just prior to Jobs coming on board and its cancellation. I don't think NeXT brought anything tech wise to Apple that Apple couldn't have done already. In reality it was a Steve Jobs/Avi Tevanian coup that led to the mass layoff of a whole lot of people and the garbage binning of a lot of good tech (Newton, OpenDoc, Dylan just to name a few). In any case if not for the iPod/iPhone/iTunes jump, Apple would probably be dead by now. They were in trouble until the revenue and brand cachet from that started to roll in. What I mean to say by this is: Apple needed neither BeOS or NeXTstep. They needed urgently management discipline and to ship the decent tech they already had. Jobs came on board and provided discipline, killed a bunch of expenses, and kept a lifeline going through the iMac sales, but wasted that money on the OS X transition when they probably could have just finished Copland in that time. But hey, I wasn't there, so...

dilap 9y ago
Yeah, definitely, the focus that Jobs' provided was far more important than the tech. I doubt Copland was going anywhere, though, no matter how much time they gave it. The underlying tech of NextStep was just so much better than the classic macOS assembly/pascal, cooperative-multi-tasking, single-memory-sapce, GetNextEvent() universe. Just too hard a problem to try to modernize while still so closely tied to MacOS in your mind...they needed to make a clean break.
- cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  My understanding after reading a bunch of articles (now I'm an expert!) is that what became 'Carbon' in OSX was based in part on work done for Copland. And that API maintained reasonable good classic compatibility (at the source / API level) while modernizing it a whole bunch. And it shipped quite quickly after the coup, so it must have been based on something existing prior to it. But such was the politics of Apple under Jobs/Tevanian that the (quite esoteric by industry standards) Cocoa/Objective-C ecosystem was considered superior and Carbon was actively deprecated despite being quite successful with third party developers...
  - dilap 9y ago
    Sure, Obj-C was esoteric, but also well-designed and impressively ahead of its time. Witness that a minor evolution of the same tech went on to form the foundation of iOS. Even now, with Apple trying to transition to Swift, it's unclear to me that's an overall win. The combination of C plus message-passing was inspired. So basically I agree Cocoa was better tech than Carbon. Carbon was popular with devs 'cuz that's what they were used to, and that's what their existing apps were written in...it was a great stop-gap measure, but wouldn't have provided nearly as good a foundation for the future (in my opinion).
    - cmrdporcupine 9y ago
      I dunno, after doing iOS development for two years, I was very unimpressed with ecosystem. The UI toolkit is actually surprisingly low level for what it is. But it has served Apple well overall I suppose. I think ObjC is a terrible language tho.

lern_too_spel 9y ago

Android was started to compete with Microsoft in mobile. It still would have existed and likely still would have attained dominant market share.