My father's most regretted financial move is ignoring his weird thought to buy 10 shares of Apple stock at this time.
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20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
11–20 of 267 posts
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#12>> What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, but made the iPhone, iPad and more possible as well. What prevents Apple from making the iPhone and iPad? They could have bought Palm, QNX, did something based on Linux... What was the key? BSD? Objective-C? I don't see those being that important. The one thing NeXT did enable them to do was the PowerPC to Intel switch.
The totality of Nextstep (kernel, os, obj-c runtime/component model, frameworks, gui layer, tooling, expert teams who built and maintained these things, etc, etc) was much greater than Palm or QNX, let alone something yet unbuilt 'based on Linux'.
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#13"I’d argue that this is probably the single most important tech acquisition of all time." Microsoft buys the pieces that eventually become MS-DOS? Going back further, pharma companies buying tech that they turned into mass produced antibiotics and gave us the sulfa drug revolution? Apple buying NeXT hardly compares to the acquisition of steel smelting.
I'd suggest the author's definition of 'tech' meant 'computers'.
I don't believe Microsoft acquired QDOS, just the IP.
Furthermore, bringing Jobs back to Apple resulted in Apple going from nearly bankrupt a top 5 Market Cap Company in the world (http://dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap.htm)
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#14Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#15My father's most regretted financial move is ignoring his weird thought to buy 10 shares of Apple stock at this time.
Mine, too. I was working my first appdev job at a startup in 1999, and as they talked about IPO and such I thought "apple, that would be some cool stock to own" based on my IIc nostalgia from school. I had no idea how to actually buy any at the time, though, and not a strong enough desire to pursue it further.
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#16My father's most regretted financial move is ignoring his weird thought to buy 10 shares of Apple stock at this time.
I remember being in college and Apple stock was at $7. I had some money in an E-Trade account, but Apple was in such dire straits that I figured a better use for $7 was to buy lunch at Chick-Fil-A. There was a good chance the lunch would be around longer than Apple would! I don't even want to think about how much a couple thousand $$ of Apple stock would have been worth at its peak.
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#17My father's most regretted financial move is ignoring his weird thought to buy 10 shares of Apple stock at this time.
My dad remembers his broker calling him up at various times and trying to get him to buy Apple because it was basically worthless (which is also why he didn't buy it).
Wouldn't have taken much to make a lot of money.
Of course, most people, even if that lucky, would have sold early iPod era thinking "This can't continue" and wouldn't have made the profits they would if they held until the last year or two.
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#18>> What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, but made the iPhone, iPad and more possible as well. What prevents Apple from making the iPhone and iPad? They could have bought Palm, QNX, did something based on Linux... What was the key? BSD? Objective-C? I don't see those being that important. The one thing NeXT did enable them to do was the PowerPC to Intel switch.
Steve Jobs, without any doubt. Apple's renaissance wasn't so much about technology as about an entrepreneur at the top ( instead of a manager) who could turn the ship around.
A solid UNIX operating system with a well-designed UI certainly helped in terms of technology. As did Objective-C. Technologically, Apple's achievements would've been difficult to realise with their classic Mac OS (which Apple knew quite well as they had been shopping around for a new operating system technology for quite some time at that point).
NeXTSTEP and Objective-C probably hit a sweet spot there, albeit one that would only come to fruition years later. I doubt Apple's current success would've been possible (in the way it turned out to be at least) with BeOS (another serious contender at the time) or Linux.
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#19My father's most regretted financial move is ignoring his weird thought to buy 10 shares of Apple stock at this time.
10 shares of AAPL in 1996 isn't that large of a windfall today.
The stock has had 3 splits 2:1,2:1,7:1 in that time frame. 10 shares in 1996 would have had a cost of $7.50 and a present market value of ~$32,000.
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#20>> What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, but made the iPhone, iPad and more possible as well. What prevents Apple from making the iPhone and iPad? They could have bought Palm, QNX, did something based on Linux... What was the key? BSD? Objective-C? I don't see those being that important. The one thing NeXT did enable them to do was the PowerPC to Intel switch.
Steve Jobs, the team he assembled, and a willingness to cut. Apple at the time was running the Newton which, although I loved programming it, was a totally wrong direction. It just wasn't connected as Mr. Jobs explained in his Q&A[1]. He built a much better OS than the Mac at that time.
Palm couldn't build the iPhone with Palm and had to build WebOS. QNX is amazing, but its UI and client developer library wasn't there or else RIM / Blackberry would have used that. Apple had used Linux, and frankly, there was no way Apple would have done a Linux-based system after the whole GNU thing at NeXT.
I do think Objective-C, the developer tools, and NS class libraries don't quite get the credit they should. They were very good (go read the Taligent documentation). Truthfully, if Adobe and Microsoft hadn't insisted on Carbon[2], the Mac would have been much better off.
Apple had done an Intel translation internally and had the institutional knowledge already from the 68K to PowerPC transition.
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3MrpLyUOo8 - its pretty amazing some of the statements, guess the clone thing changed
2) not absent the Classic layer, just absent Carbon.