Unlikely to be better in supportability terms, since we are talking about a 30 year old OS on 30 year old hardware that wasnt the primary development target. H

Unlikely to be better in supportability terms, since we are talking about a 30 year old OS on 30 year old hardware that wasnt the primary development target. However, in terms of build quality, I would take the old HP 9000s over NeXT cube any day. Those old HPs were engineering workstations built by an HP that at the time still cared about engineering. Jobs and the NeXT crew built beautiful things, but at that time they didnt have the decades of experience that HP did. (I'd say the same about old RS/6000s by the way.) A trivial example is how when you open up the back, engineering workstations did not slice up your hands on stamped metal frames and risers. Whereas PCs of the time generally did. (Compaq was a notable exception, but you paid a price premium for it.)