Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

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Subsequent disclosures suggest that Apple had screwed the pooch over Taligent/Pink, and was desperately shopping for a next-generation OS. The contest was down to NeXTStep, with Steve Jobs, or BeOS, with Jean-Louis Gassee. As I understand it, the BeOS folks held out for too much money (Apple was much closer to broke than they realized) while Jobs settled for power. All else is history.

If Apple's successive post-Jobs CEOs (Sculley and Amelio) hadn't maneuvered the behemoth into a blind alley, NeXT would indeed have faded eventually. But with full access to Apple's resources, the NeXT team were able to turn things around. Sitting on the top shelf in my office, gathering dust (I turn it on every couple of years) there's a cube. A nice shiny silver cube that runs something that looks eerily like NeXTStep, if you squint at it, with a classic MacOS emulation bag on the side. If that's not a statement by Steve Jobs (and a trophy of success, to have the elbow-room to make such a statement) I don't know what is!

Pink and then Taligent definitely caused Apple to lose traction, but Copland put them in a serious skid that forced them to choose between Be and NeXT.

While Apple saved NeXT, it was a near thing for both companies. Without the 'loan' Jobs was able to secure from Microsoft, it's doubtful Apple would still exist as a separate entity. Whether it was Sun, Oracle, or another company, it would probably remain today as an object framework and not much else.

The Microsoft investment wasn't financially significant at the time; the main benefit was the end of the IP wars and the agreement to keep selling Office for the Mac.

It was absolutely financially /significant/, but you're correct that the software support helped shore up investor confidence.

Remember at the time that Apple had been running at a loss for the last year or two before this and had started to cut R&D funding. This is when Apple was struggling to hold onto about 2-4% of the personal computing market, dropping from about 10% just a year or two before. They had experienced a precipitous drop across the board, in technology, sales, and financials.

It was quite feasible to entertain thoughts of takeovers, hostile or otherwise, from Sun and Oracle. Either of them (and MSFT) had the ability to make it happen at the time. Oracle priced the effort at about $700m but expected a worst case scenario of about $1.5-2b. The motivation was mainly a "FU" move by Ellison to put Jobs back in control of Apple, but floated as a way of accelerating their JavaStation and client computing vision.

This was also when Apple laptops were burning people before burning people was cool. :-)

150 million dollars wasn't going to make of break Apple at the time. Amelio and Andersen floated a bond issue of many times that amount the past year to resolve cash flow concerns and 1997 was when Apple regained profitability. It was mostly a move to settle investor confidence by signifying Microsoft's bet on Apple's future success.

Another interesting "What if" is if they had decided to go BeOS way, Mac OS X wouldn't be a UNIX system.

Not sure how that would have gone with all the geeks that went for Mac OS X without an Apple background, just because it is UNIX.

Bane made an insightful post a few days ago about 'scene' computing vs workstation computing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624912

That has had me rethinking your what-if. I don't think the unix is a big deal - the Be and Haiku terminals feel unixy, and BeOS offered a big subset of the unix system calls even into v3 (time of Apple purchase).

By v4.0 (two years after), BeOS had become a remarkable system for single-user, close-to-the-metal computing. The user experience was very fast and stable. The system gave a skilled developer easy access to video and audio.

I've been trying out haiku again this morning. They've done good work. It now boots on my thinkpad, but, like OSX or Windows, feels sluggish in a way that Be never did. It needs some serious performance tuning. They need to get their out-of-the-box development experience sorted out too. OSX has done an excellent job of that.

What attracted me to BeOS on those days was somehow the Amiga feeling I felt in the platform, hard to explain.

And as someone that will gladly do C++ development, it felt really nice to have an OS done in it.

But I feel Apple would have needed a different type of marketing to attract developers back then.

When I was at CERN they were selling us "It is BSD/NeXT with a nice UI" story.

Thanks for the link, by the way.

See what you mean re unix.

Yeah - I've always been unable to describe that weird connection to the platform, what you call the Amiga feeling.

Going to boot back into haiku now and see if I can get blender working :)

BeOS had every geek salivating madly with the BeBox. Two processors, man! And it could play two mpegs at the same time!

It was also "unixy" enough without having all the Unix baggage.

I was salivating for it as a former Amiga fan and due to the fact it was(is) a C++ based OS.

and the geekport!

OMFG, the Geekport!

I really think it was the NeXT engineer's tech demos showing that they could run Openstep on different processors and also that they could complete the 'Blue Box' in time.

Actually it was the Newton that made Apple loose so much money. It was never profitable with an average annual loss of 1 billion USD. But if it wasn't for that loss, Steve Jobs would never have been requested to be a consultant at Apple and turn himself into the CEO later.

Much of this sounds wrong.

The Newton was hardly a money-maker, but IIRC, Apple invested somewhere north of $500 million over the course of the Newton project, and sold about $150 million in units. Many of its sales were the last models, notably the MP2100, largely because these units had such impressive processors for their time (162MHz StrongARM). That is, the Newton got Steved just when it started picking up.

More importantly, as part of the Newton project, Apple invested $1.5M in ARM, and made some $800M in profit from that investment. That ARM investment and early Newton-driven design is still reaping dividends in Apple's current low-power devices.

Fuck you. The Newton was a HUGE(!!!!!!) loser. You are just too fucking lazy to look it up. I was working in the 90's. I remember this and I'm not going to waste my time learning you easy to find information. FUCK OFF AND DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK.

OT: I wish their was a way to delete my fucking account. This site is a bunch of armchair CTO's who don't know their eye sockets from their assholes.

More importantly, as part of the Newton project, Apple invested $1.5M in ARM, and made some $800M in profit from that investment.

Wow. That is fascinating.

"average annual loss of 1 billion USD."

Citation? This is an interesting factoid, so I googled for about 10 minutes, and couldn't find any numbers on how many total newtons were sold, and how much apple lost on them. Really interested in any supporting data you might have.

So you voted down my comment because you couldn't find a citation on Google? First link :-> http://www.edengene.co.uk/article/how-the-world-learnt-from-... using https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&#...

That link suggests a total loss of about 750 million over 11 years from start of development to discontinuation. That's an order of magnitude less than the 1 billion annual loss you originally claimed.

Wasn't me - I actually was really interested in your comment (as I indicated).

The link you provided, btw, states, "Although the exact scale of the Newton losses remains unconfirmed, some sources say that the company sunk a billion dollars into the Newton and recouped only about one quarter of that amount in sales."

"Some Sources" might have merit if that was the Wall Street Journal, or New York Times (though, in both cases, those "sources" might have ulterior motives") - but they aren't useful in this context.

Also, as a later poster indicated, losing $750mm over the lifetime of a multi-year project, is a lot (lot) different than losing $1B/year.

I'm still intrigued, and would love if (anyone) could track down some data on the Newton, and it's losses. Or even how many units it actually sold.

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