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20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

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Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#81

Post by satysin »

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.

IMHO Steve's vision of small and beautiful devices finally came at a time when the technology was allowing for it to be possible. CPU, storage and battery improvements along with good/clean design allowed the iPod to become a real product and not just a design in a notebook. Then the iMac, unibody laptops, iPhone, etc.

Steve always thought big whereas Bill (Gates) thought practical. Steve got back into Apple at the perfect time to finally take advantage of the technology for something that a non-geek wanted.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#82

Post by [deleted] »

njharman wrote: post #76
sbov wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's an utterly ridiculous comparison. Companies / stock prices are not a normal, random distribution like roulette results. There are masses of information available on companies / stock market. Assuming roulette wheel is fair, there is none other than 1/32 chance known.

[deleted]

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#83

Post by Scuds »

FreeFull wrote: post #33
wineisfine wrote: post #30

I read that the NeXT, let's call it, "adventure", is the reason Apple went with a Linux distribution as basis for their new OS and thus, we're all using OSX now?

As far as I know, Apple has never used Linux for anything in any capacity. OSX's kernel is XNU, and it's a hybrid of BSD code and Mach.

Maybe not in anything they've shipped as a consumer product, but what's powering their services?

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#84

Post by [deleted] »

nateguchi wrote: post #43
msimpson wrote: post #38

"I’d argue that this is probably the single most important tech acquisition of all time." However, it was not Apple's first choice. They first attempted to acquire Be Inc. (BeOS) but Jean-Louis Gassée held out for $275 million and lost the deal in a surprise move when Apple, instead, bought NeXT.

Now that would be an interesting alternate timeline! / MacBook Pro with Blinkenlights bar /

[deleted]

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#85

Post by threeseed »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #51
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.

Don't agree with this at all.

NeXT was an actual operating system that people used. You could run word processing apps from which you could print and email. There was a fully fledged development platform with real developers building real third party apps. BeOS was more like a giant tech demo.

If we focus on just the technologies choosing BeOS would have meant at least a few years more engineering effort. And you still wouldn't have been able to replicate the ground breaking nature of OSX in the short time frame required.

I suspect both financially and in consumer mind share they would have never recovered from selecting BeOS.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#86

Post by pavlov »

rwc wrote: post #65
SkyMarshal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is demonstrably false. MacOS Copland was scrapped in favor of a descendant of NeXTSTEP that became MacOS X. Hundreds (thousands?) of API calls in both Desktop iOS development are prefaced NS_ ... that is NeXTSTEP

This is ridiculous pedantry, but the "NS" prefix actually means "Next / Sun". It was introduced in OpenStep [1], which was supposed to become Sun's GUI layer on Solaris until Java happened.

Before the OpenStep revamp, the class prefix used in NeXTSTEP was "NX". I think there are still some lingering NX* classes/functions you might see in AppKit stack traces.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#87

Post by Esau »

Apocryphon wrote: post #66
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.

There's stories on HN about Haiku from time to time. That project's still going on in the background.

Just a few days ago, in fact:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13200633

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#88

Post by pavlov »

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.

I bought a bit of Apple stock in 2001, when it was in a rut after the dot-com crash... The next year, I sold the stock to buy a frigging 10GB iPod, of all things!

That might have been the world's most expensive iPod.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#89

Post by function_seven »

njharman wrote: post #76
sbov wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's an utterly ridiculous comparison. Companies / stock prices are not a normal, random distribution like roulette results. There are masses of information available on companies / stock market. Assuming roulette wheel is fair, there is none other than 1/32 chance known.

Please tell me what ticker symbol I should buy today, that will rise in value over 10,000% over the next two decades.

Nobody can. Over a 20 year timeline, it’s essentially the same as a roulette wheel.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#90

Post by TheCondor »

threeseed wrote: post #85
SkyMarshal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't agree with this at all. NeXT was an actual operating system that people used. You could run word processing apps from which you could print and email. There was a fully fledged development platform with real developers building real third party apps. BeOS was more like a giant tech demo. If we focus on just the technologies choosing BeOS would have meant at least a few years more engineering effort. And you sti…

If it was even possible. I liked beos, but it was an rtos with a GUI on it. No real network stack, no real print stack, I don't even remember the state of internationalization. No multiuser story or security story. It's not clear the you could add that stuff to be.
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