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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 BeO
by 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.