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20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

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Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#51

Post by SkyMarshal »

Apocryphon wrote: post #9

It would be great if someone wrote an article about the alternate histories where Apple chose other strategies. For instance, what an Apple-Be merge would have resulted in, what kind of products and tech. And how NeXT would have lasted without Apple.

None of the tech really mattered, not much anyway. What Apple really got with NeXT was Steve Jobs' vision, along with a more seasoned CEO better capable of realizing that vision. Whether Apple had gotten BeOS or NeXT didn't really matter all that much in comparison.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#52

Post by coldtea »

sbov wrote: post #44
generj wrote: post #4

My father's most regretted financial move is ignoring his weird thought to buy 10 shares of Apple stock at this time.

Whenever I start to think like this, I remind myself that it's about as useless as thinking "if only I bet it all on 00" at the roulette table. Crystal balls that see the future are certainly in short supply. But if I had one there's a lot better ways to make money than using it to buy 10 shares of Apple 20 years ago.

>Crystal balls that see the future are certainly in short supply.

Yes, but Apple, from 1999 until Jobs died at least, and for some time more, gave people opportunity after opportunity to buy a constantly sky-rocketing stock. If someone didn't see it with the first iMac (1999 IIRC), they should have seen it with the iPod. If not, then with the iPhone. They had many chances to buy that stock.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#53

Post by zeveb »

j_koreth wrote: post #29
protomyth wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ther…

> GNU thing at NeXT. Can you elaborate on this?

See: http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...

NeXT wanted to keep the Objective-C frontend to GCC proprietary, but Richard Stallman believed that would violate the GPL.

I know, it's terrible: NeXT had to contribute back to a community they only wanted to take from.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#54

Post by Fnoord »

EliRivers wrote: post #8

"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.

It was no doubt an important acquisition, but 'the most important'? Someone who makes such a bold claim has gotta be someone who really knows computer history extremely well.

This is just one of those 'what if' scenarios.

If Apple didn't buy NeXT someone else would've innovated a good capacitive touchscreen device. Maybe it would've been Nokia. They were busy with experimenting with that long before the first iPhone got released, see the Nokia 770 and Maemo (or actually check its successor, the Nokia N800). Perhaps Elop would never have become the CEO of Nokia. Perhaps Nokia would've still be around. Perhaps not? We'll never know. Everything's connected.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#55

Post by saretired »

bluedino wrote: post #6

>> 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.

Apple's OS of that era was still single-threaded and an antique next to Windows. NeXT gave them a modern OS. Performance was falling further and further behind Intel-based systems. NeXTSTEP ran on Intel, Sparc and PowerPC. And most of all, NeXT gave them Steve Jobs.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#56

Post by wineisfine »

dglancy wrote: post #50
wineisfine wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So OSX has nothing to do with unix/linux?

macOS (and older OSX releases) are UNIX (see http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3627.htm for certifications). Linux is not UNIX (its not certified - not many are - see http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/index.html ) and could best be described as POSIX like.

Thanks for the explanation. I thought Unix and Linux had something to do with eachother, but looking at the downvotes, I was wrong :D

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#57

Post by jghn »

donatj wrote: post #49
iblaine wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I haven't heard someone mention BeOs in over a decade. That was a pretty OS, but I'd take that black NeXT case any day. Those NeXT boxes were so cool.

BeBoxes were beautiful although maybe in a way only a mother could love.

the das blinkenlights were so badass though

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#58

Post by hbosch »

user837387 wrote: post #45
wineisfine wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great to hear. Have you read Jobs' biography and do you think everything said about Pixtar around those times are accurately portrait?

Can you please mention from which author since I imagine there are more than one?

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is generally considered the definitive biography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_(book)

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#60

Post by d0m »

wineisfine wrote: post #27
rootbear wrote: post #25

I was working at Pixar at the time and a couple of us went out to lunch when the news broke to figure out What It All Meant. We passed Steve's office on the way out and one of our party, who had worked with him since early Apple days, congratulated him. The big question was whether they would keep the Unix plumbing visible and useful, or would it be buried under some API layer of no use to us Unix graybeards. Fortuna…

That's great to hear. Have you read Jobs' biography and do you think everything said about Pixtar around those times are accurately portrait?

You might want to read Pixar and Beyond, which seems to portrait a much more realistic view.
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