8 ms·
I wish apple had bought Be instead of NeXT
by natas 5y ago
I wish apple had bought Be instead of NeXT
- scelerat 5y agoHard to imagine Apple today without the Second Coming of Jobs. Incredible, aquihire. Hard to imagine JL Gasee leading Apple in the same way.
- Apocryphon 5y agoWould’ve been interesting if a post-return Jobs Apple had bought Palm in the 2000s, after Palm had acquired both Be Inc. and Handspring.
- aaronbrethorst 5y ago‘Posted from my RIM BlackBerry’
- 404mm 5y agoTill this day I still miss the hardware mute/unmute button.
- microtonal 5y agoWhat do you mean? iPhones have a hardware button for mute/unmute?
- Underphil 5y agoI have a OnePlus 8T which also has a hardware mute switch. They're there, you've just gotta look around.
- simondotau 5y agoHeck no. BeOS was a tech demo that looked great because you couldn’t do anything complex with it. The list of missing features is endless. The longevity of the platform is unknowable. And there is no reason to think the injection of BeOS would have abated the steady decline of Apple’s relevance. NeXT gave Apple a mature platform which has withstood the test of time, underpinning multiple architecture changes and adaptation to dramatically different devices. And more importantly, it gave Steve Jobs back to Apple, who orchestrated its recovery from a decline into irrelevance.
- laumars 5y agoI did run BeOS for a period and it felt a pretty decent system to me. In fact it was my preferred platform for a good while.
- nerdponx 5y ago> The list of missing features is endless. I've never heard someone say this before. What's an important missing feature that other OSes had at the time?
- jandrese 5y agoA decent web browser was the most obvious problem for a long time. Be was different enough that it was hard to port anything that expected a Berkley socket interface, which was all internet applications.
- perardi 5y agoRobust printer support and color management. Which at the time would have been super super duper important for the just-hanging-in-there Mac user base. (I was one of them. It was just hanging in there.) The Mac’s professional niche was printing. Prepress. Big press runs. QuarkXPress. And BeOS could barely print, and had no color management to speak of.
- jonstewart 5y agoYeah, DisplayPostscript/DisplayPDF was a very big deal and upgrade with MacOS X right from the start. That’s an underrated advantage that NeXTStep brought to the table.
- rdsnsca 5y agoOnly the first server version of macOS X used DisplayPostscript, Apple replaced it with "quartz" . DisplayPDF. so they would not have to pay the license fee to Adobe.
- sf_sugar_daddy 5y ago