BeOS would have been a fine foundation for smartphones and tablets. But of course it’s an open question whether Apple could have got that far in the 2000s without the return of Jobs. I suspect the company would have been acquired or merged with some unsuitable suitor like Sun.
Unless you _want_ your solitare game have the ability to enumerate your contacts and send mail.
They could have built that on top of BeOS just as well as on NextStep.
Because computing devices, and access to them, was not so ubiquitous back then. Families all had to share a single computer. Business users had to share access to large servers. There were no smartphones. Some had to travel to an educational setting just to see or use a computer.
source: kernighans readingbook, "unix a memoir" or something like that, great read
I wonder, though, it is based on MacOS somehow, right? Which is based on BSD. Could there be some left over multi-user plumbing sticking around in a technical sense?
Android is in a similar boat. They're still an important way to manage filesystem access of programs.
Most vendors have this enabled now and things like work accounts/MDM use the same system.
> [...] User data is partitioned into separate directories, each in their own data protection domains and protected by both UNIX permissions and sandboxing.
POSIX users are quite important.