Many moons ago I read that Apple came super close to buying Be, but Jean-Louis Gassée wanted to much money and negotiations fell apart. I reckon it was the sta

Many moons ago I read that Apple came super close to buying Be, but Jean-Louis Gassée wanted to much money and negotiations fell apart. I reckon it was the star power of Jobs more than the OS as such that saved Apple in the late 90s. Jobs' ability to do the deal with MS to get MS Office on the Mac and a cash injection of $150m saved Apple at the time. We were well into the 2000s before OSX really began to make a difference to Apple's fortunes, and no one could have predicted that OSX would be the foundation for the iPhone OS. It wasnt even a given that OSX would be the OS for the iPhone during development. But absolutly, NeXT was the best choice, even if the OSX Beta and 10.0 were almost unusably slow and buggy! I was at the Paris Mac Expo when Jobs launched the beta, and the excitement was amazing! Same year as the Key Lime iBooks IIRC. They rose up our of the floor on a pedastal if I'm remembering it right LOL. I worked at Apple in the 90s, and saw all the demos of early releases of OSX and the confusing stack of platforms and tools. Jobs did the right thing ditching that! Finally, I remember being at the Mac Expo in London and BE was there. We were standing around admiring the cool light bars on the front of the Be Box and its multitasking abilities. If I'm remenbering right the lights on the front went up and down to indicate CPU usage. I could be imagining that? Someone correct me if I'm misremembering :-)