Yes. To paraphrase Ray Noorda, it'd still be dead, but it would have been a much more interesting death.

Oh my goodness, just think of the eulogizing of NeXT that we’d be doing here on Hacker News.

But who knows, maybe in that alternate timeline Sun succeeds in making a Solaris for the masses, and Linux becomes an obscure footnote. Some flavor of BSD ultimately becomes the oddball alternative to Windows (which dominates) and Solaris which is the runner-up developer favorite.

Dead.

Apple almost died the first time mostly because Gassée went for margins instead of market share when he was at Apple.

And then BlackBerry or Microsoft CE ends up launching the mobile revolution. Oh dear.

Nah, those were available for years and never reached anything close to iPhone/Android levels of adoption. It's possible that Android (the "better Danger" version, not the "iPhone clone" version) would have still happened, but it may also have languished without the iPhone to pave the way.

Agreed.

The original pre-Google Android was a Blackberry-killer, and I don't reckon that was a good way to go.

You can see some early prototype devices here: https://www.androidcentral.com/android-pre-history

As usual for Ars, it has a far more detailed history, with pre-1.0 screenshots: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/building-android-a-4...

You can see that, before the iPhone, it started out as a Blackberry clone, or something like it. And that, IMHO, was far to geeky a toy to change the world as the iPhone did.

On the other hand, maybe we’d all have physical keyboards now instead of poking at glass...

I remember being so enthusiastic about Android development and then the iPhone came along and was just 10 years ahead.