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"This was a collapsing metal failure, melting into a pool of fire and being consumed by it. Perhaps it was a more accurate representation of NeXT's true reality."

As a former NeXT developer, I can confirm this as spot-on foreshadowing.

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Considering the Phoenix like rise the platform made, it was accurate at the time but short sighted.

Eh, sort of. Important parts of the OS did eventually get recycled. But NeXT was sold in 1996, and OS X didn't come out until 2001. And the hardware ambitions were a total crater. I'd say it worked out much better for Jobs than NeXT.

The guy who did this (Simpson Garfinkel) was known for writing several books about programming for the NeXT. He later wrote a book on Cocoa programming in the early years of OS X that was clearly just a modification of one of his NeXT books (as especially in the early versions OS X was basically still NeXTStep underneath), so Garfinkel managed to get something out of his NeXT days despite the symbolic ending of it by burning his cube.

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