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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

> I still wonder what would have happened had Jean-Louis Gassée been less greedy and Apple acquired BeOs instead of Next.

Nothing different would have happened. You would have used C++ instead of Objective-C to write macOS UI programs, but other then that macOS would be in the same shitty state it as is today (assuming a wildly popular iPhone would also have happened in that alternative timeline and take the focus away from desktop UI development).

One thing might probably be different: macOS might be less popular amongst developers because BeOS wasn't a UNIX clone (but 'Linux on the desktop' might actually be in a better state).

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>I still wonder what would have happened had Jean-Louis Gassée been less greedy and Apple acquired BeOs instead of Next

Internal efforts to get BeOS's security levels up to even Mac OS 9 levels would have bankrupted 1997 Apple.

Most of the developers of the microcomputer revolution era programmed in Non-Unix environments.

Even in workstation space, the cool lisp/smalltalk/... developers hated unix, but the small market was filled with unixes.

Even today, most of the native developers use windows!

Yes, this - OS X wouldn't have become a near-ubiquitous developer desktop. That would have been very bad for Apple.

Really? Most users I have come across are not developers. A high proportion of developers use it, but the proportion of users who are developrrs is quire low.

I think you'd have got a much smaller eco-system of third party apps for MacOS (think omnigraffle etc). Whether that would have made a substantive difference I can't say.

Developers drive adoption (not least by creating software) and high specs.

Yes, but those developing for Apple OSes would have adopted whatever OS Apple used.

The developer who pick it because it is a Unix are people who developer for Unix like OSes, mostly for servers, so they mostly do not produce software that drives adoption by people who are not developers.

This is true. Only upside I can see is that the developer tools available for "unix-ish" system were really strong (if clunky at times).

I don't even think it's true that a high proportion of developers use Macs. My guess would be that most developers use Windows, because most developers work for corporations and most corporations issue Windows machines to all employees. Companies which offer a choice are in the minority.

The rest of the world doesn't use OSX for all.

I beg to differ.

I am a techie, I travel a lot, and I've worked for both the 2 biggest enterprise Linux vendors.

Windows boxes are in use in both of them, and Windows laptops are everywhere -- but the second most popular platform after Windows, and the 2nd most popular after Linux inside Linux vendors, is macOS.

It's everywhere.

The partial exception was when I moved to Czechia. A decade ago it was still relatively poor. Few iDevices, few Android phones, lots of Windows Mobile then. Not many Macs except inside big companies.

But that's changed. Now they're everywhere there, too.

MacOS is huge. I see Macs everywhere, far far more than I ever see ChromeBooks in the real world. I think most ChromeBooks are probably in schools.

I'm from Spain. Europe it's Androidlandia, that's it. When a Xiaomi device it's as good as most iPhones at a far lower price (for basic needs), then Android curbstomps Apple there.

At work, Windows. Forget Apple, or Chrome. Companies will set AD and Windows.

On backends and high tier servers, developing machines, and so on: GNU/Linux, hands down. The IT companies virtualize Windows machines with KVM, set up an AD domain under a VM and call it a day. No Apple there.

OTOH, I have to say that iPads have a much better touchscreen for handwritten input with lightpens. Hope Android solves that soon.

> Europe it's Androidlandia, that's it.

I reject all your generalisations.

I'm an Irish citizen who until 2023 lived in Brno then Prague. Since I moved to the Isle of Man I've travelled and worked in Latvia, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Czechia, Austria, England, Ireland, and Scotland, from memory. While I lived in Czechia I routinely travelled in all the countries it borders.

I have seen more iPhones in use than any single make of Android, and more iPads than all other forms of tablet put together. MS Surface tablets are #2 and outnumber all Android tablets put together. I am typing on a work-provided MacBook Air and my boss also uses MacBooks, and I think the majority of the company works on them, but we stopped having a central office years ago so my sampling is very ad hoc.

At both the enterprise Linux vendors where I've been a paid full-time member of staff, most managers and marketing people use MacBooks. (IMHO this is a damning indictment of desktop Linux but that's incidental.)

My own direct observations in the last decade refute your claims. I can't give you numbers but let's put it this way: the majority of the guests I invited to my wedding in 2023 I had to use Apple Messages from my iMac to contact, because they're not on any of the systems I use: Whatsapp, Signal, or Telegram.

Your experience is NOT representative.

>managers and marketing

YOu said it all.

>Managers and marketing

Ah, well, the most irrelevant place from a company compared to the actual product development.

Thus, no wonder everyone sees Macs as fancy toys just to show off instead of doing actual work. The times from OSX under G4 being a really good system for A/V and press/journalism production are long gone.

It can be, but any Windows or even some Linux machine with Krita and some medium A/V tools with some -rt kernel with Pipewire can destroy OSX on performance. Ardour is no joke and people has tools like DavinCi. There's no need to spend $4-6k on a Mac Pro any more. Pick any high end Nvidia card with hardware encoding/decoding and A/V producing can be trivial.

If OSX it's just a tool do bullshit presentations, OSX it's doomed in the desktop.

The iPad it's everything else. It's really good at handwriting, and it's really good for students at uni doing tons of writtings and notes, and OFC for painting and photo manipulation.

You are demonstrating and perpetuating bigotry and prejudice.

Who uses them does not matter. What they use them for does not matter.

You claimed there were no Apple users in Europe. That is a blatant falsehood. Now you have explained why you lied: because you admit it was a lie and that there are lots of people using them, but you think those people are not important, and so you ignored them and did not count them.

I am not interested your value judgements. I may even share some of them but that is not important. The point is that Apple kit costs more because Apple doesn't make budget models and doesn't use cheap cut-down components like Celerons and "Pentium Dual Core" and other budget junk.

Apple costs more. So Apple is bought by or for richer people. Management and marketing make more money so they get more expensive toys.

I am not arguing if this is right or wrong. It isn't relevant. The point is, it sells, it's used in large numbers, and as such it's commercially important.

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