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I brought up NextSTEP because it was a notable success that was not mentioned by the parent comment. And arguably, NextSTEP is a success story because of its d

I brought up NextSTEP because it was a notable success that was not mentioned by the parent comment. And arguably, NextSTEP is a success story because of its design which enabled it to crossover successfully into mobile through iOS. NextSTEP's blueprint allowed iOS to operate at a performance level that other OS'es and architectures could not match when it debuted. BeOS was fine, but it was rightly or wrongly seen as a spiritual successor to Amiga, which only had a niche market. NextSTEP wanted to be a spiritual successor to MacOS, but never really could until Steve Jobs forced it in there. Even so, the technical design points of NextSTEP were well-suited for a resource constrained mobile platform, and that is one reason iOS has been such a success.

the_why_of_y 12y ago
Agree with you that NextSTEP is well designed (at least in the upper layers, not necessarily the Mach-based kernel...) but the reason why it succeeded where BeOS failed are not technical: BeOS failed because of network effects (market too small for ISVs) and Microsoft actively preventing OEMs from installing it, and NextSTEP avoided both of these problems by being bought by Apple. iOS is not really running on a "resource-constrained" platform; the first iPhone already had 128MB RAM, which was a lot of RAM for a PC in 1999, in particular considering the low screen resolution. Apple just got the timing right; the mobile hardware became powerful enough to run "real" OSes (instead of things like Symbian or WinCE that were actually developed for resource-constrained hardware) around 2005.