4 ms·

BeOS seemed really nice at the time. I'm not sure if it would have worked out better in the long run, but it sounded great. I always had the sense that consume

BeOS seemed really nice at the time. I'm not sure if it would have worked out better in the long run, but it sounded great. I always had the sense that consumer focused computers should be engineered with real-time capabilities, and instead, they ended up being based on time-sharing systems which seems like it hampers UI and media processing. For decades, and especially presently, I get so frustrated with lags and hiccups no matter how fast the CPU and storage are.

smallstepforman 7y ago
Responding before the horde of Jobs fanboys claim the underlying OS didn’t matter. They like to forget that NeXT alone didn’t matter, nor did PowerPC Mac’s or the initial scroll wheel iPod’s all under Jobs stewardship. The company was saved by the following: - transition to x86, and Bootcamp fallback. - iPhone, with decent touch interface and native (non Java) API and open AppStore - iPad at right time. Without this trifecta, Apple would be extinct like SGI, Sun, and the others. BeOS was what the geeks wanted. It was modern, multi core, C++ based, and with the backing of a big company, would have seriously dominated the desktop computing landscape. I’d be willing to state that Apple would have had a bigger market share with BeOS rather than NeXT.
- samatman 7y ago
  Apple was robustly profitable by 2003, when I purchased my first Mac running OS X and a third-generation iPod. They turned that corner in the beginning of 1998 in fact[0]. They sold 50 million iPods in 2007. [0]: https://www.cultofmac.com/461234/today-in-apple-history-apple-is-back-in-the-black/ https://www.cultofmac.com/461234/today-in-apple-history-appl... It wouldn't be a trillion-dollar business without the iPhone, sure. I've no reason to think it wouldn't still be in business, and you haven't given any. It's certainly possible that Apple would have thrived with a next-generation Mac based on BeOS. Personally, I wouldn't have switched; I was tired of dual-booting Yggdrasil Linux and Windows, and the prospect of buying a (relatively) affordable Unix workstation was exciting to someone who cut his teeth on SparcStations. I'm not the median customer, then or now, however. Back then she was probably in desktop publishing; BeOS would have been just fine.
  - pavlov 7y ago
    Apple wasn’t consistently profitable since 1998. For example they lost $195M in 1Q2001 with revenue down a stunning 57% YoY: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/01/17Apple-Reports-First-Quarter-Results/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/01/17Apple-Reports-First... The iPod + iTunes Music Store was the real turnaround. Before that in 2001 it seriously looked like Apple might not make it, Jobs or not.
  - rvz 7y ago
    Well most people have chosen to forget the fact that either way for Apple's NeXT vs BeOS decision, Apple was close to being bankrupt anyway, had it not been for Microsoft bailing them out for $150 Million due to competition rules. The decision and terms was up to Microsoft. [0] So Apple was very 'lucky' for this generous investment, without it would have seen them join the local museums and nostalgia meet-ups, like Amiga, OS/2 and BeOS. [0] https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech-0806/ https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech-0806/
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      Apple wasn't leveraged back then, like we're used to companies being now, like, say, Tesla is. I think this is the disconnect between common assumptions and the way it really was.
    - samatman 7y ago
      It was more than luck; Apple was involved in a long-running lawsuit against Microsoft, one which they might have had to settle, and were running the serious risk of losing. Microsoft was also doing a decent business selling Office to Mac users, which they would lose if Apple went out of business. Last but not least, Apple stock was trading for a buck a share in August of 1997. If Microsoft held on to those shares, that $150 million investment would be worth almost 49 billion dollars today. Not bad.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  This sounds to me like someone who didn't live through the period or wasn't paying attention, because it dismisses/leaves out the iPod and iTunes store. When the iTunes store opened, that was the exact moment at which Apple was clearly a different company that was going to skyrocket. I did not have or maintain faith in Jobs, unfortunately for me. But that was the moment of "take all your money and buy call options". As evidence of my opinion, you could look at the discontinuity in the stock price and how it proceeded to break out of the cyclical range it had been in for years and years.
pvg 7y ago
worked out better in the long run The bigger obstacle is that it would not have worked at all in the short run - it was closer to a technology demonstrator than a complete OS. It's often presented as some sort of key decision between similar options, perhaps because Jean-Louis Gassée was also a former Apple exec and remains a well-known commentator. But I don't think it was anything like that, Apple already had plenty of its own half-finished OS tech.
- protomyth 7y ago
  I had both NeXTSTEP and BeOS, and you are spot on about BeOS. It just wasn't finished and had a lot of things it needed to do to get to the level of NeXTSTEP.
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  I occasionally hear this, but it's at least worth noting that there are people -- like me -- who ran BeOS full-time. I did for over a year. Gobe Productive was an AppleWorks-like office suite (by the original authors of AppleWorks, no less), Pe was a good BBEdit-ish code editor, the image editor e-Picture resembled Macromedia Fireworks... I could go on with many other apps. As subjective as it is, I preferred BeOS to Linux as a desktop OS at that time because the nascent app ecosystem was already nicer to use and, at least to me, more complete. (It's important to remember that "at that time" was 1999, which predates the first release of OpenOffice by over two years!) In any case, NextStep didn't do anything in the short run for Apple -- it took dozens of engineers about four years to turn NextStep into OS X, and it's hard to believe that they couldn't have done the same thing with BeOS. Most of the reports I've read suggest BeOS was actually Apple's first choice, but Be, Inc. demanded what they considered an unreasonable price. I think the biggest difference was vision: BeOS was shooting for the creative media market, while NeXT's biggest successes had come in very enterprise-ish verticals. BeOS was arguably a closer fit to the Mac's "prosumer and creative professional" vision; my unconfirmed, probably off-the-wall suspicion has always been that The Enterprise (tm) was closer to Gil Amelio's button-down, old school semiconductor industry heart. Buying NeXT clearly turned out to be great for Apple as a company -- just not for the reasons Amelio had in mind.
  - 7y ago
thelittleone 7y ago
I share that frustration example opening MacBook in public after closing it with a video playing and mashing the Touch Bar mute key. Another example open MacBook start typing account password, but 8 or so characters in, the OS wakes up and deletes everything you’ve entered already so have to start again.
bangboombang 7y ago
I think not being a real multi-user OS would have lead to trouble sooner or later, if it wouldn't have felt so unfinished in the first place. This was at the dawn of the internet, so you didn't really think about privilege separation on a desktop OS.
- Razengan 7y ago
  > I think not being a real multi-user OS would have lead to trouble sooner or later iOS is still doing great. :)
Flow 7y ago
I feel the same. I fondly remember doing hour-long raytracing on the Amiga and having set the priority to something low I never noticed the rendering going on. On the Mac, it seems no matter what I set the priorities of the involved processes, long compiles makes it impossible to game at the same time.

smallstepforman 7y ago

Responding before the horde of Jobs fanboys claim the underlying OS didn’t matter. They like to forget that NeXT alone didn’t matter, nor did PowerPC Mac’s or the initial scroll wheel iPod’s all under Jobs stewardship. The company was saved by the following: - transition to x86, and Bootcamp fallback. - iPhone, with decent touch interface and native (non Java) API and open AppStore - iPad at right time. Without this trifecta, Apple would be extinct like SGI, Sun, and the others. BeOS was what the geeks wanted. It was modern, multi core, C++ based, and with the backing of a big company, would have seriously dominated the desktop computing landscape. I’d be willing to state that Apple would have had a bigger market share with BeOS rather than NeXT.

samatman 7y ago
Apple was robustly profitable by 2003, when I purchased my first Mac running OS X and a third-generation iPod. They turned that corner in the beginning of 1998 in fact[0]. They sold 50 million iPods in 2007. [0]: https://www.cultofmac.com/461234/today-in-apple-history-apple-is-back-in-the-black/ https://www.cultofmac.com/461234/today-in-apple-history-appl... It wouldn't be a trillion-dollar business without the iPhone, sure. I've no reason to think it wouldn't still be in business, and you haven't given any. It's certainly possible that Apple would have thrived with a next-generation Mac based on BeOS. Personally, I wouldn't have switched; I was tired of dual-booting Yggdrasil Linux and Windows, and the prospect of buying a (relatively) affordable Unix workstation was exciting to someone who cut his teeth on SparcStations. I'm not the median customer, then or now, however. Back then she was probably in desktop publishing; BeOS would have been just fine.
- pavlov 7y ago
  Apple wasn’t consistently profitable since 1998. For example they lost $195M in 1Q2001 with revenue down a stunning 57% YoY: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/01/17Apple-Reports-First-Quarter-Results/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/01/17Apple-Reports-First... The iPod + iTunes Music Store was the real turnaround. Before that in 2001 it seriously looked like Apple might not make it, Jobs or not.
- rvz 7y ago
  Well most people have chosen to forget the fact that either way for Apple's NeXT vs BeOS decision, Apple was close to being bankrupt anyway, had it not been for Microsoft bailing them out for $150 Million due to competition rules. The decision and terms was up to Microsoft. [0] So Apple was very 'lucky' for this generous investment, without it would have seen them join the local museums and nostalgia meet-ups, like Amiga, OS/2 and BeOS. [0] https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech-0806/ https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech-0806/
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Apple wasn't leveraged back then, like we're used to companies being now, like, say, Tesla is. I think this is the disconnect between common assumptions and the way it really was.
  - samatman 7y ago
    It was more than luck; Apple was involved in a long-running lawsuit against Microsoft, one which they might have had to settle, and were running the serious risk of losing. Microsoft was also doing a decent business selling Office to Mac users, which they would lose if Apple went out of business. Last but not least, Apple stock was trading for a buck a share in August of 1997. If Microsoft held on to those shares, that $150 million investment would be worth almost 49 billion dollars today. Not bad.
perl4ever 7y ago
This sounds to me like someone who didn't live through the period or wasn't paying attention, because it dismisses/leaves out the iPod and iTunes store. When the iTunes store opened, that was the exact moment at which Apple was clearly a different company that was going to skyrocket. I did not have or maintain faith in Jobs, unfortunately for me. But that was the moment of "take all your money and buy call options". As evidence of my opinion, you could look at the discontinuity in the stock price and how it proceeded to break out of the cyclical range it had been in for years and years.

pvg 7y ago

worked out better in the long run The bigger obstacle is that it would not have worked at all in the short run - it was closer to a technology demonstrator than a complete OS. It's often presented as some sort of key decision between similar options, perhaps because Jean-Louis Gassée was also a former Apple exec and remains a well-known commentator. But I don't think it was anything like that, Apple already had plenty of its own half-finished OS tech.

protomyth 7y ago
I had both NeXTSTEP and BeOS, and you are spot on about BeOS. It just wasn't finished and had a lot of things it needed to do to get to the level of NeXTSTEP.
chipotle_coyote 7y ago
I occasionally hear this, but it's at least worth noting that there are people -- like me -- who ran BeOS full-time. I did for over a year. Gobe Productive was an AppleWorks-like office suite (by the original authors of AppleWorks, no less), Pe was a good BBEdit-ish code editor, the image editor e-Picture resembled Macromedia Fireworks... I could go on with many other apps. As subjective as it is, I preferred BeOS to Linux as a desktop OS at that time because the nascent app ecosystem was already nicer to use and, at least to me, more complete. (It's important to remember that "at that time" was 1999, which predates the first release of OpenOffice by over two years!) In any case, NextStep didn't do anything in the short run for Apple -- it took dozens of engineers about four years to turn NextStep into OS X, and it's hard to believe that they couldn't have done the same thing with BeOS. Most of the reports I've read suggest BeOS was actually Apple's first choice, but Be, Inc. demanded what they considered an unreasonable price. I think the biggest difference was vision: BeOS was shooting for the creative media market, while NeXT's biggest successes had come in very enterprise-ish verticals. BeOS was arguably a closer fit to the Mac's "prosumer and creative professional" vision; my unconfirmed, probably off-the-wall suspicion has always been that The Enterprise (tm) was closer to Gil Amelio's button-down, old school semiconductor industry heart. Buying NeXT clearly turned out to be great for Apple as a company -- just not for the reasons Amelio had in mind.
- 7y ago

thelittleone 7y ago

I share that frustration example opening MacBook in public after closing it with a video playing and mashing the Touch Bar mute key. Another example open MacBook start typing account password, but 8 or so characters in, the OS wakes up and deletes everything you’ve entered already so have to start again.

bangboombang 7y ago

I think not being a real multi-user OS would have lead to trouble sooner or later, if it wouldn't have felt so unfinished in the first place. This was at the dawn of the internet, so you didn't really think about privilege separation on a desktop OS.

Razengan 7y ago
> I think not being a real multi-user OS would have lead to trouble sooner or later iOS is still doing great. :)

Flow 7y ago

I feel the same. I fondly remember doing hour-long raytracing on the Amiga and having set the priority to something low I never noticed the rendering going on. On the Mac, it seems no matter what I set the priorities of the involved processes, long compiles makes it impossible to game at the same time.