Comment by mdasen

I think the downvotes are a bit harsh, but I think it's hard to say that Apple definitively made the right move (beyond getting Jobs back and him creating a direction beyond just computers).

Many people said that NeXT was further along than BeOS, but it was still four years from Apple buying NeXT to Mac OS X shipping. People talked about printer support being ahead in NextSTEP, but OS X had terrible printer support for a while - basically until they bought the CUPS team. Display PostScript was ahead of its time, but being "behind" wasn't really a problem for Windows there and realistically the hardware of 2000-2008 wasn't exactly great for OS X's graphics needs (and Apple needed to re-implement it as Display PDF/Quartz to get around licensing costs).

BeOS was blindingly fast on 90s and 2000s hardware and Apple definitely could have used that as a differentiator. Realistically, without non-computer products, would Apple have survived? I say this as someone who ran System 6 through OS 9 as well as every version of OS X. OS 9 was lovely, but technically flawed and just way out-classed by Windows. OS X was so slow it was nearly unusable.

I think claiming that there's something unique about Unix making it portable to mobile isn't really backed by any evidence. Be had already created BeIA for "internet appliances" which were low-resource machines. In fact, one could argue that Be's thrifty use of resources would have been a better fit for mobile than OS X.

Apple's real benefit to buying NeXT was getting Jobs, not getting NextSTEP. BeOS probably would have gotten out the door faster and with less pain. You might like OS X as it has evolved, but back in 2001 it was just pure pain while BeOS was joyful. But buying Be might have meant no iPod and no iPhone. It's hard to know how history would have gone, but it seems a bit of a stretch to claim NextSTEP was a much better OS, that it's uniquely good for mobile, or that it set Apple up for the next 50 years.