All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990) • Hacker News Board

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#51

Post by aaronbrethorst » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 1:27 AM UTC

wheels wrote: post #50

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it turned out pretty well for NeXT. They are the third largest company in the world by market cap, now.

Their hardware was a resounding flop and building a state-of-the-art production facility for something for which there was no demand is in retrospect clearly a mistake. Also, given that NeXT was bought for about 15% of Apple's market cap (after laying off most of their employees), it's disingenuous to imply that Apple == NeXT. What saved Apple was the iPod, not OS X and Cocoa.

NeXT, effectively, acquired Apple for negative $429 million (and 1.5 million shares of Apple stock): As everyone knows by now, what began as an Apple purchase of NeXT has been turned inside out and become a NeXT takeover.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/1997/03/2596

edit: I want to add a couple points to my followup.

1. NeXT's hardware was a resounding flop. Their state-of-the-art factory turned out to be for naught. This is absolutely true.

2. That said, this mistake did not prevent NeXT from co-opting Apple and becoming the third largest company (by market cap) in the world.

3. Apple == NeXT: Apple was, pun intended, rotten. Steve Jobs and his most trusted lieutenants assumed key positions of power throughout Apple. The only highly visible and critical Apple employee I can identify who pre-dated Steve's return to Apple is Jony Ive. However, Ive was laboring in obscurity before Steve assumed his position as "iCEO" of Apple[1 and 2].

4. Arguably, the iMac saved Apple. In one of the recently-posted WWDC or Macworld keynotes, Steve addresses this point in quite a bit of detail. The iPod made Apple a veritable powerhouse...but not at first[3]. The iPhone made Apple, well, Apple. As it happens, the iPhone (and OS X, and the iPad) is the result of decades of engineering work that started at NeXT[4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ive#Career

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/091797apple.html

[3] http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-iP...

[4] Or, to be pedantic, at CMU, where Mach was originally co-developed by Avie Tevanian, who later became the SVP of Software Engineering at Apple.

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#52

Post by mrbill » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 1:32 AM UTC

April '93 UnixWorld cover - "Does Steve Jobs have a Future in Software?"

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210/

Ironic to look back on now, considering that OS X and the Macs that a lot of us use are the direct descendants of NeXTStep and the NeXT hardware.

I owned a few slabs back in the day, and even found a picture of when I used one as my main desktop at an ISP in the late 90s: http://www.mrbill.net/next.jpg

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#53

Post by gamble » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 1:50 AM UTC

Steko wrote: post #47

mkr-hn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quote didn't specify electronics and consumer products.

And last I checked Intel, Dell, HP et al still counted as electronics.

Dell and HP manufacture almost nothing in the US. Many/most of their products aren't even designed in-house. They contract with Asian design houses and slap their own bezel on the result.

You're right about Intel. They are one of the few significant electronics companies left in the US. But they aren't representative of the category.

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#54

Post by patrickgzill » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 2:00 AM UTC

I used to sell NeXT software and hardware when working for a company called OpenSource (they actually owned the opensource.com domain name before RedHat got it).

At that time "open" meant interopable rather than the current "open source software" meaning. For instance, the DBkit and EOF database software could talk to Sybase or Oracle or any other database for which there was a driver.

As a result we used NeXTstations for all our tasks, and really, that was the best computing environment I have used. As another poster says, we really haven't "budged the needle" since Nextstep v3.3 of the OS.

Later while working for another company I got the ability to talk to Keith Ohlfs who designed the UI and personally thanked him for it.

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#55

Post by ams6110 » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 2:16 AM UTC

spitfire wrote: post #38

jseliger wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it compare to Model M keyboards? Or the recent editions of those keyboards (see more: http://jseliger.com/2008/05/07/product-review-unicomp-custom... )?

I actually prefer the feel and sound of the NeXT keyboard over the model M. Though I much prefer the layout of the model M to the NeXT. Coding was a pain on the NeXT keyboard - no pageup/dn home/end keys. But it was fantastic for writing papers and working with mathematica, frame, etc.

IIRC the vertical bar (or was it the tilde) was in a totally nonstandard and awkward place too... didn't seem very smart considering it was still a UNIX machine.

The navigation keys were not such a big deal once you realized that all text fields accepted basic Emacs keystrokes for cursor movement.

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#56

Post by ams6110 » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 2:17 AM UTC

vinced wrote: post #32

:( I once owned 2 next cubes with matching printers. Gave them away many years ago when I started downsizing. I miss them more than some ex-girlfriends :)

Would be fun to get an old cube and stick a mac mini (or few) inside it.

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#57

Post by foobarbazoo » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 2:35 AM UTC

slowcpu wrote: post #42

bmastenbrook wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel fabs chips here. They assemble electronics in China. Edit: And that's assuming that they assemble electronics at all, which I wouldn't bet on.

Recent Intel Fabrication Locations: Fab 24 Leixlip, Ireland Fab 28 Kiryat Gat, Israel Fab 68 Dalian, China Fab 42 Chandler, Arizona, USA -------------------------------------- Recent Intel Assembly Sites: Heredia, Costa Rica Chengdu, China Kulim, Malaysia Penang, Malaysia Saigon, Vietnam Chandler, Arizona

Most of that is almost certainly, in part, for tax related reasons. Intel is profitable; profitable US companies want to keep those profits outside the US (see: Google).

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#58

Post by thought_alarm » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 2:37 AM UTC

jseliger wrote: post #29

gluecode wrote: post #3

I have a NeXT cube from the 1990s. It is one of the best built products in terms of build quality, I have ever seen.

How does it compare to Model M keyboards? Or the recent editions of those keyboards (see more: http://jseliger.com/2008/05/07/product-review-unicomp-custom... )?

    > How does it compare to Model M keyboards?

The 1st-gen NeXT keyboards use Alps key-switches, like the Apple keyboards of the late-80s. The one I have is rock-solid and one of the finest keyboards I've used.

It also had some clever innovations:

- It is very compact. It has the same width as a traditional PC keyboard, but without the top row of function keys. That means it's only 5 rows high.

- Consequently, the Escape key is next to the "1" key, where the backtick/tilde key would normally be. However, the tilde is an important character in Unix, so if you hit Shift+Escape as if to type a tilde, you'll still get a tilde character. It's a nice touch.

- The Control key is next to the "A". Command and Option keys are on both sides of the space bar.

- There is no Caps Lock key. To engage Caps Lock, press Command+Shift; green LEDs on both Shift keys light up to indicate Caps Lock.

- There are no home/end/page up/page down keys. They are replaced with Power, Volume up/down, and Brightness up/down. All NextSTEP applications support the traditional Emacs shortcuts for Home/End/Page Up/Page Down etc., and that tradition lives on in OS X.

- The hardware (cube, monitor, or printer) has no buttons or switches of any kind. Power, volume, and brightness can only be controlled from the keyboard (like a modern laptop). That means you can't turn the machine on or off without the keyboard, and the keyboard connects to the monitor!

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#59

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 2:46 AM UTC

wheels wrote: post #50

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it turned out pretty well for NeXT. They are the third largest company in the world by market cap, now.

Their hardware was a resounding flop and building a state-of-the-art production facility for something for which there was no demand is in retrospect clearly a mistake. Also, given that NeXT was bought for about 15% of Apple's market cap (after laying off most of their employees), it's disingenuous to imply that Apple == NeXT. What saved Apple was the iPod, not OS X and Cocoa.

[deleted]

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#60

Post by bane » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 3:09 AM UTC

radicaldreamer wrote: post #6

mkr-hn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufacturing in the US has never been better. It's the number of people needed to manufacture stuff in the US that's been declining.

Due to wage/cost inflation in China and the coming rise of the Yuan (along with the weakness of the dollar), the US is about to become the cheapest place for high end manufacturing in the world.

The good news is that the U.S. is decades ahead of most countries in terms of automated manufacture. Probably only Japan and South Korea (maybe Germany too) can comfortably compare. The videos linked to in this same topic show a completely automated surface mount process to build the motherboard of a computer. Something that's still not regularly used in most countries because it's hard and expensive. Easier to just have low paid workers solder the stuff on by hand.