You have to have marketing and market fit with tech that's good enough. That's the lesson of history, time and time again.

I don't think that's true. Apple is a lot more mass market than they used to be, but the tech that goes into their products is quite advanced. For example, the iPad Pro benchmarks that put Apple's CPU in the same class as the Intel CPU used in MacBook Pros is pure tech. There's nothing fashionable about a CPU.

Apple's Face ID recently passed a hacking test that other facial recognition systems failed. The latest Apple Watch has an ECG. Perhaps health is fashionable, but that's also tech built into a tiny product.

Apple's camera tech consistently scores near the top of the pack.

I'm not arguing their products are perfect or anything of that sort. I just don't think it's fair to characterize Apple as being more about fashion than tech, because I think they're quite busy pushing tech forward on mass market products.

That being said, I do wish Haiku well because I get the feeling that it really could be great.

I don’t know. A BeOS-based MacOS would’ve been ready for prime time years before Mac OS X was. And one suspects the Finder would have been usable. But there would be no iPhone.

I'm not so sure. NeXTSTEP was pretty stable. I get the feeling that a lot of the delay had little to do with NeXTSTEP and much more to do with Apple and Adobe/Microsoft. Plus, the development environment was no where near as good on BeOS.