I am one of those idiots who still believe Apple is a hardware company and as with all hardware companies, software is an afterthought.
When they ditched OS9 for BSD this reinforced my belief.
I honestly believe without BSD there would be no NeXTSTEP/OSX/iOS/macOS/watchOS/tvOS, etc. This article suggests they could have used BeOS. But, they did not.
My hope has always been that Apple would optionally sell hardware without a pre-installed BSD/Mach-derived OS, allowing users to install their own choice of OS.
For example, a fully open source BSD with a BSD kernel. That would be my choice but other users might choose differently.
I am not interested so much in the graphics capabilities of Apple HW. I am after the form factor.
I remember having that "Is Apple a hardware company or a software company?" debate endlessly with other folks at Apple and outside of Apple back in the early-mid 90's. Back then, all the big names were either one or the other and we thought that meant that Apple should pick one because they were failing at trying to do both.
Steve settled that debate fairly early on and showed that both sides were wrong. Apple sells "the whole thing". They sell a curated experience that involves their close management of the hardware, the software, key peripherals, the iTunes store, etc. They do all that so they can deliver more than they could by pursuing some single niche part of the experience.
He quoted Alan Kay during the iPhone launch to explain how Apple went about doing things: "If you really care about software, you should build your own hardware." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XAfTXYa36f4
But note which he mentions first. In that phrase software clearly takes primacy.
When NeXT was on the ropes they got out of hardware but kept making the software. Likewise when Apple was in trouble they opened up the hardware but kept the software close to their chest because that's where the value is.
Why is this the case? Where is the value in the OS? Its all about the ecosystem. The OS is important because of all the applications that users can run on it. Word, Excel, Photoshop, InDesign, etc. The key advantage NeXT had over Beos was an ecosystem of applications - modest compared to the Mac but it existed, there was no OmniGroup for BeOS - and there was a robust set of developer tools and frameworks to build those apps on.
PC hardware is a commodity. Anybody can build a computer from components in their bedroom. Building a new OS from scratch is a whole different ballgame. And no, rolling up a new Linux distro doesn't count.
My parents still have my old StarMax somewhere around their attic. Last I heard, a sibling nuked the old IDE hard drive and now it doesn't boot at all. Sometimes I feel nostalgic and want to try to recover what I can from it, but... that's a giant can of worms.
Shouldn't be hard to recover. Stick a compact flash card in it with an ide adapter (adapters are $4) and find the OS cd. You can burn one if you can't find the original.
In line with that, I tend to think of them as my goto for laptops. The first laptop I ever owned was a 12" PowerBook and it was solid and every part worked well with the whole. Every Apple laptop I've owned has had that same polish.
>Perhaps at one time.. now I think they are an 'ecosystem lock in' company, and use hardware and software to achieve that means..
I keep hearing this, and I find it as ridiculous as ever if not more.
Music for today's people means basically streaming -- you move to Windows or wherever and you get from Apple Music to Spotify (or even keep using Apple Music). No lock in. Music geeks who hoard mp3s/flacs are not locked-in either. And the minority who "carefully curates" their playlists and adds annotations to their music files (which might not port easily) is insignificant.
Ditto for movies. Besides, Neflix, Amazon video, etc dominate there too.
Ditto for apps. Most apps exists on both platforms. And those that do not and you can't live without (e.g. Sketch for some, or Things for others, etc), are a genuine advantage, not a "lock-in". Most are not even Apple's anyway.
And it's not like you suffer any great loss if you give up your iOS (or Android for that matter) app purchases to go to the other side. The majority of people have just 10-20 apps they've bought from some survey's I've seen. Besides, millions of people move from Android to iOS and vice versa all the time, and their old apps doesn't stop them.
Mail -- you have IMAP. You can use whatever client on whatever platform.
The same goes for other things. Heck, most apps a "normal" person uses are through the web these days, and play equally well.
If Apple locks-in anybody with something, it's convenience and end-to-end product line. Not some nefarious scheme.
It is the "small" nuisances such as "AppleID", "AppStore" and "XCode" that differentiate now from then.
I have owned Apple HW both then and now. These "hoops" are not optional conveniences, they are forced.
The Apple computers now come with "services" pre-installed. Other companies pay for placements. Again, not optional. Nor a new idea. We saw this with crapware on PC's and laptops.
But, unlike crapware, these cannot be uninstalled. The best one can do is ignore them. This is not always enough since they may be unintentionally launched and run in the background.
The company makes a determination on what users "should" want, and wiping their computer free of all marketing is not among the "acceptable" uses. I bought the HW. It is mine. That is how things used to be.
Whether I choose to continue to interact with Apple afterwards is my choice, not Apple's.
Stupid example: How do I use my own time servers for setting system time in iOS? Should I have to work around a default setting by the company that cannot be disabled or should I be given control to create or change that setting in the first instance? Is appropriate for the company to assume I want to use their remote servers and data centers for anything?
For those who understand what "root" is, the idea of having to "root" a computer you bought is insane if you think about it.
In a former decade Apple marketing claimed the company was moving in a different direction from IBM where they alleged individuality was being stifled. "Following the company line" was frowned upon. If the marketing was to be believed, Apple would presumably set the user free.
Today, Apple uses UNIX-like, free BSD-licensed software, and its implementation of permissions to appoint themselves as remote "system administrator" for every person who buys one of their computers.
As if these computers all belong to a single company and hence must all run the company-approved OS and seek approval for changes, installing software, etc. What about individual users who are free to think for themselves and make their own choices? In Apple's view these users either do not exist or they should look elsewhere for their computers.
The saddest part of this "evolution" toward control of the user after purchase and lock-in to becoming a patron of Apple businesses, and the success Apple has had, is that other companies try to emulate it, e.g., Microsoft.
Fortunately it seems like Apple users are starting to question some of the tactics, e.g., removing headphone jacks. Windows users complained about version 8 when the "Start" button disappeared. But consider younger users who may never have been exposed to S/PDIF headphone jacks or a Windows "Start" button.
If older computers gave users more control and posed less risk to user privacy, then this I think is not a part of history that these market-driven companies have any interest in keeping alive through future generations.
I believe that when users defend one or the other of these large companies all trying to lock them in (presuming they have no financial stake of said companies), they may be simply reacting, maybe subconsciously, to a lack of choice and a feeling of helplessness. These are users who must accept at least one of these companies into their daily computing activities and so they defend their "choice". No user can be faulted for this when they effectively have no real choice.
As I see it, the notion of having "choice" in computer use is becoming more and more illusory. This is especially true for younger users born into a world where they can and do depend on their computers for almost everything.
One might argue that they are left to "choose" to between the lesser of a few evils. They have to "trust" at least one of these companies. Not 50% trust but 100%. They must go "all in". For whatever reason, some will commit themselves 120%. They will be the staunch defenders, the advocates, the "influencers".
The question is how much of the trust is actually earned by these companies versus being given to them by users on faith in the face of no viable alternatives. I remember not having to even consider whether to "trust" Apple. Back in those days brand-new computers did not begin sending packets to company-selected remote servers as soon as you plugged them in for the first time.
It should go without saying but the "monopoly" issue might also have some relevance to an absence of real "choice". That is all I will say.
No, it was a very minimal kernel that did just enough to handle the hardware and schedule threads. There was no memory management; everything ran in a single process.
Later versions started looking a little bit more like a conventional operating system. For instance, a file system was added in 3.0 to support the removable SD card.
BeOS would not be able to run Classic MacOS PowerPC/68K apps. They'd have to use some sort of emulator if Apple went with Be.
Be did have the BeBox that had a Geekport that Apple could have used to better expand Macs for.
There was this ARDI Exeuctor software that could run 68K Classic MacOS stuff in Linux, Windows, NextOS, and I think they were porting it to BeOS.
NextOS was a much better choice due to the OpenStep librarie shared with HP, Sun, Oracle, and others. It was forked as GNUStep and ported to Linux and other operating systems.
Apple has always been a hardware company that has the software integrated to the hardware. It is because they bundle both together than it works better than PCs running Windows from everyone and their brother making PC Clones. Even with the Hackintosh stuff not all drivers work and some Hackintoshes don't have things that a Mac does like OS updates, etc.
BeOS was made into a multimedia OS to challenge AmigaOS that already was a multimedia OS with Video Toaster and other stuff. BSD aka NextOS was more of a workstation/server OS and clearly the better choice.
Just a slight correction, Blue Box was a version of the classic environment that only ran full screen. It only made it as far as some of the developer previews. When Aqua was announced, it became the classic environment, where classic apps could be run along side modern cocoa apps without having to switch full screen between the blue box and the NeXT-derived OS.
10.4 also marked the Intel transition. Classic was a virtual machine, so making it work on x86 would have been a huge undertaking. 10.5 still supported PowerPC, but by then it was obviously not the future.
A MacOS emulator was already available for BeOS and able to run any MacOS 9 application on BeOS. If I remember correctly the code name was "sheep shaver"...
Yep, but it would only run up to 8.x. I think, 8.5, but it could have been 8.1. They Mac OS after 8.5 changed a lot, and I think the BeOS version of sheepshaver stopped being able to load the OS.
It worked with no extra files on a Mac running BeOS, on a BeBox it required a dump of the toolbox ROM.
The question I have always had is what would happen if BSD project committers were allowed and enabled to write drivers for Apple hardware.
There must be many reasons why Apple cannot sell hardware with full specs to enable open source developers to write drivers, but being an idiot I could not tell you what those are. As I see it, any value Apple adds to the hardware is in how they select components and build the computer. I fail to see how controlling who can write drivers adds value for the user.
The "hardware/software integration" is great. Up until the company starts using their position as exclusive "integrator" to lock down products and dictate how those products can be used after they have been sold.
Hackintosh is a noble effort but it differs from what I want. I do not want an Apple BSD-like OS to run on any non-Apple hardware. I want a non-Apple BSD OS to run on any Apple hardware. This will not happen, but I still think about it and wonder.
They really want you to buy into their ecosystem. They want your Mac and iPhone pulling you into their iCloud/etc services - not unlike Amazon's Kindle hardware in that respect. Of course, it's my understanding that Amazon's hardware/os are more commoditized (since they run a modified Android, iirc).
I am one of those idiots who still believe Apple is a hardware company and as with all hardware companies, software is an afterthought.
When they ditched OS9 for BSD this reinforced my belief.
I honestly believe without BSD there would be no NeXTSTEP/OSX/iOS/macOS/watchOS/tvOS, etc. This article suggests they could have used BeOS. But, they did not.
My hope has always been that Apple would optionally sell hardware without a pre-installed BSD/Mach-derived OS, allowing users to install their own choice of OS.
For example, a fully open source BSD with a BSD kernel. That would be my choice but other users might choose differently.
I am not interested so much in the graphics capabilities of Apple HW. I am after the form factor.