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> Jobs' decision to ship NeXT on 68k at the very moment when the architecture fell behind basically crippled the platform. There were a bunch of dropped balls

> Jobs' decision to ship NeXT on 68k at the very moment when the architecture fell behind basically crippled the platform. There were a bunch of dropped balls there. To rattle off a few: * They targeted academic institutions first, which very much constrained their market, and didn't align well with the $6,500 base price. Which turned into closer to $10K once you bought a disk and printer. (Slightly more than $20K in 2020 dollars.) * Disk performance on a base Cube was terrible, thanks to the reliance on an Magento-Optical disk as primary storage. (Seek times x3-4 of magnetic disks.) * Their hardware was very good, but it's expensive to be in the hardware business and others had the resources to vastly outcompete them. * Choice of 68K didn't help. NeXT got two chips (030 and 040) before they started having to look elsewhere. (There was an 060 that even got used in some accelerator boards, but the market was in a wholesale shift over to RISC by that time. It also can't have helped that Motorola's own RISC follow on to the 68K, the 88K, got almost immediately replaced by their PPC venture with IBM and Apple.)

wpietri 7y ago
And as somebody who wrote NeXT software for a number of years, they never really aimed to solve anybody's problem particularly well. If I had to sum up the NeXT, I'd call it "a much better Mac". Which isn't surprising given that Jobs started right after getting forced out of Apple, and took a number of Mac folks with him. But as you say, $6,500 was way too much for the Mac's strongest market, education; that's like $13k in 2020 dollars. Instead it was priced like a workstation, but it also wasn't great for that, in that it was a totally new OS and didn't have much software available out of the gate. I've heard of multiple schools that ended up with NeXT labs where almost nobody used them. The only niche where I really saw adoption was with financial traders, who had money to burn and liked the rapid development speed you could get compared with other platforms of the day. But that was never a goal, just a happy accident. So in retrospect, I feel the whole thing was not about helping any specific customer, but about Steve Jobs and his feelings about getting booted from Apple.
- mschaef 7y ago
  > If I had to sum up the NeXT, I'd call it "a much better Mac". Which is pretty much how it wound up, eventually.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  > I've heard of multiple schools that ended up with NeXT labs where almost nobody used them. My university was one of these. We had a huge lab filled with shiny NeXT cubes... which, for reasons unknown, was owned by the communications department. Just try to imagine the befuddlement of a bunch of early ‘90s journalism majors who have just been seated in front of Unix workstations. No matter what you imagine, I guarantee the reality was worse.
vondur 7y ago
Didn’t NeXt get sued by Apple and had to abandon the lower end market where they would have competed against them?

wpietri 7y ago

And as somebody who wrote NeXT software for a number of years, they never really aimed to solve anybody's problem particularly well. If I had to sum up the NeXT, I'd call it "a much better Mac". Which isn't surprising given that Jobs started right after getting forced out of Apple, and took a number of Mac folks with him. But as you say, $6,500 was way too much for the Mac's strongest market, education; that's like $13k in 2020 dollars. Instead it was priced like a workstation, but it also wasn't great for that, in that it was a totally new OS and didn't have much software available out of the gate. I've heard of multiple schools that ended up with NeXT labs where almost nobody used them. The only niche where I really saw adoption was with financial traders, who had money to burn and liked the rapid development speed you could get compared with other platforms of the day. But that was never a goal, just a happy accident. So in retrospect, I feel the whole thing was not about helping any specific customer, but about Steve Jobs and his feelings about getting booted from Apple.

mschaef 7y ago
> If I had to sum up the NeXT, I'd call it "a much better Mac". Which is pretty much how it wound up, eventually.
smacktoward 7y ago
> I've heard of multiple schools that ended up with NeXT labs where almost nobody used them. My university was one of these. We had a huge lab filled with shiny NeXT cubes... which, for reasons unknown, was owned by the communications department. Just try to imagine the befuddlement of a bunch of early ‘90s journalism majors who have just been seated in front of Unix workstations. No matter what you imagine, I guarantee the reality was worse.

vondur 7y ago

Didn’t NeXt get sued by Apple and had to abandon the lower end market where they would have competed against them?