I was at Motorola Tokyo Design Ops, back in the day and the General Magic people and the old Mac people and the Next people were frequently coming through.

I learned the 56K on the NeXT (and it saved my butt when I had to emulate a slow small MCU (together with an FPGA) to build a real-time emulator so our customer (Canon) could complete development in parallel with the US mothership getting their act together for shipping verified silicon). But I didn't spend much time with the i860. I should have. And, over course, their main CPU (68040) was better than the 68020s running on my desktop workstation.

That Magnetic Optic thing, though, it turned a pretty slick design, and a very slick SDK, and an "ok" implementation of Display Postscript into something that just felt like a sluggish brick. And, of course, back in the day, Jobs hated networking because it was "just an umbilical cord back to the mothership".