Ironically it didn't work out both ways: for a short time you could run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware, licensed and stuff, but all it did was hurt hardware sales

Ironically it didn't work out both ways: for a short time you could run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware, licensed and stuff, but all it did was hurt hardware sales while not making enough money to cover software engineering for the OS. Then again, a ton of stuff went bad for Apple at that time. NeXT on the other hand was always intended to run on diverse architectures, not sure on the timeline vs. Windows NT, which had the same model (with the HAL, multiple kernels etc.). It's pretty sad to see that go away, but it also makes total sense; modularity and USP-as-a-service doesn't pay off and doesn't make users (the mass of them) happy. Loosely coupled but highly cohesive systems work best, it's why classic Mac OS completely failed in at the end of its life, and why all the other projects at Apple were a dead end compared to the *nix projects (and of course buying NeXT). It's also why NT worked, and why at some levels Android fails miserably. (but Google notices and started to fix the cohesion issue at the OS level with Android One and their patching methods vs. complete monolithic OS upgrades which then needs vendors to back port)