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Comment by chungus_khan | Hacker News Reader

NeXT was also mostly ahead of the market on the software side. Their machines were a very tough sell compared to the price and performance of other UNIX workstations of the time (which is why I know SunOS and not NeXTStep).

All the vision and all the software quality in the world won't make you competitive in the 90s UNIX workstation market if your machines are underpowered, and we were used to garbage software anyway. Chasing the "personal workstation"/PC market also would never work. DOS/Windows was far too strong and the Macintosh deep in a niche. It's very unfortunate.

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NeXT failed on the hardware cost side because they wanted to be a personal computer and not a workstation. They were priced for neither market.

I looked very seriously at Unix machines around the time NeXT came out, having been converted to that religion in college. NeXT started at around US$6500, and that was with the optical disk only. The equivalent-ish Sun box (Sun 3/80) started at around US$15k with disk as I recall and went up in price really fast if you wanted more memory/disk/etc. About the cost of a new Honda Accord at the time. And the Sparcstations were out at much higher performance (and price...I seem to recall around US$22k for a usable config).

On the other hand, you could get a nicely decked out 386/33 for maybe half the cost of the NeXT, or a 486 for a grand or so more. And it ran tons of software, even if it was garbage. Even Unix.

This is a good comment. To put more data here:

1st NeXT Computer 1988: Motorola 68030/25Mhz w/68882 FPU, 64MB RAM max. MIPS: 4

Sun Workstation 1988 Sun-4 line: Spac @ 16-33Mhz, 32-768MB RAM MIPS: 7-114

Now having used both, the desktop and usability on the NeXT was so much better.

The low-end NeXTstation was $2999 if I recall correctly. I had one. For the price you couldn’t get a faster machine.

The NeXT at launch was $6500 list for the base model. There were academic deals where you could get it for less, but that's not what we are talking about. And you could get a machine for $3k at least as fast in 1988; the 68030 was past it's prime. If by 'NeXTstation', you mean the 'Slab' pizzabox NeXT, that was $5k list for the mono version, released in 1990, and had a 68040. You could get a much faster machine for $3k in 1990.

The trade name for the original $6500 cube was the NeXTcube (68030). The names for the pizza box workstations were the NeXTstation (68040/25 MHz) and NeXTstation Turbo (68040/33 MHz). The NeXTstation spec’d out at 15 MIPS.

You could buy a NeXTstation for $4995 on the open market, and considerably less with an educational discount.

You could buy a Sun Sparcstation 1, which was released a bit earlier and ran a RISC 20 MHz processor but it was $9,000.

If I recall correctly, SGI workstations like the SGI Indigo at the time started at somewhere around $7500 and depending on configuration could be nearly $40k. The SGI Indy, which was the low end SGI machine, was faster and priced at an identical $4995 - but it wasn’t released until mid 1993.

The first Macs to use the 68040 weren’t released until mid 1992. And they also cost $7,000+.

I am unaware of a machine that was available in 1990 for under $5,000 that had more horsepower. If you can point me to one I’ll gladly concede. But at the time I was actually a NeXT campus consultant, which meant I was selling them and knew the specs of both the NeXT products and the major competitors, and I’m not aware of one. Certainly by 1992 the Mac and high end PCs were catching up, albeit both with vastly inferior operating systems.

That was a long time ago and I could well be wrong. But if so I want to see evidence.

The fact is NeXT machines were dogs. The OS was nice but the hardware was very underpowered. I have a slab in my retro collection. It looks pretty, but a Sun Sparc from the same era is much more powerful.

You’re comparing computers that sold at very different price points.

But to the same markets. NeXTs were being sold both to the workstation and to the personal computer market. They were cheap but underpowered for a workstation, making them not very good for worksation-ish things, because you couldn't scale up. For a personal computer, they were very expensive, so they didn't do well there either.

I’m not arguing they had a good business plan - clearly they did not. All I’m arguing is that they were very good computers for the price, both in terms of software and hardware.

You are right. Sun's were much more expensive. But I would argue both were in the same class. NeXT also frequently compared themselves to Sun.

I'm pretty sure Sun offered huge academic discounts. I never saw NeXT at any of the local universities... It was mostly Sun and DEC.

Ah, a lovely machine. That was their second generation, when they were starting to get a sense of reality. Although Wikipedia has the introductory price at $4995, or nearly $10k in 2020 dollars.

"Although Wikipedia has the introductory price at $4995, or nearly $10k in 2020 dollars."

But the comparable machines of the time like the Mac IIfx or the Sun boxes of the time had similar or higher prices.

Sure, but the Mac II fx was the high-end machine in a consumer line with plenty of low-end options. And the Sun boxes were workstations targeted at businesses and institutions, where high price is not a barrier if the business value is there.

The NeXT hardware was never really competitive in either market except certain niches. E.g., all our clients were in financial trading, because they were willing to pay a huge premium for rapid app development for financial traders.

It had a significant educational discount I believe. And I was a college student.

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