Oh the memories that brings back!
So Display postscript and WYSIWYG _everywhere_ wasn't a big deal? The developer environment and DSP capabilities were pretty special....the Magnesium was a cool flex and one cable going to the monitor keyboard and mouse...the MO drive was slow, but cool.
Edit to add: And Mathematica. it was CRAZY cool.
It's interesting to me that this criticism has stayed around so many years in different forms: the iPhone has underpowered RAM compared to Androids, etc etc.
Yet consistently people pick on the overall experience not particular components.
So it's competition was the higher end of the Mac line and a bit up from that, really. Turned out there was never much of a market for personal workstations, hence the low sales numbers.
You are correct - they didn’t know how to fulfill individual sales. The box was delivered to a LTL freight crossdock, and I got a call from a dispatcher to come pick the thing up. I had to drive to the industrial part of town. A bemused guy helped me get the carton down and remove the boxes, then I got to lug thing across the yard.
It was a fun thing to have amongst my nerd friends. I ended up selling it at a nice profit because I was willing to ship it anywhere. The monitor i sold at a loss to a graduate student.
Technology was moving really fast in those days.
The additional boards were netbooted via bootp/tftp, so the additional boards could run the same kernel as the one the hard disk (and/or MO drive) was connected to. Of course, this is a distributed memory machine - not much different than running three diskless Cubes booting from a fourth machine.
Wikipedia says that they considered the Motorola 88000 but with a source that I've not been able to track down.
They also had a prototype laptop, although I don't know for certain which CPU it was based on. Because the existing battery technology couldn't provide enough juice for reasonable runtime, it was going to be a plug-into-the-wall design.
GP is exaggerating. Spark and MIPS were more expensive machines for a different market NeXT wanted a toe in but was merely straddling; business and education were NeXT's target markets. The 68030 with a math coprocessor was bleeding edge in 1988. Sun released a 20MHz and 33MHz 68030 Sun-3x in 1989, a SunOS (UNIX) workstation.[1] Apple released the 68030 Mac SE/30 (16MHz) in Jan. 1989. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the 68030 in 1988/1989. If anything, NeXT was a little fast out of the gate with the 25MHz 68030 in 1988.
By the way, the first commercial UNIXes did not have shared libraries.
PS/2 Model 80 release MSRPs were $6,995, $8,295, and $10,995, depending on the configuration, without monitor, OS, FPU, or support for display resolutions beyond standard VGA[1]. The top model included a 20 MHz CPU, 2 MB RAM, and a 115 MB ESDI hard drive.
NeXT shipped two years later, but its $9,995 MSRP[2] included the OS, application software, additional software, a 17" 1120x832 greyscale monitor, FPU, DSP, and four times the RAM of the top-end Model 80.
IIRC — and I may not, it's been decades — NeXT generally sold at or around MSRP, while other UNIX vendors and IBM typically sold at a considerable discount to large accounts and academia.
To compare with a more "garden-variety" PC, in the same BYTE issue[2] as the NeXT article, Dell was selling its lowest-end 386 for $4,199, with a 25 MHz CPU, 1 MB RAM, monochrome VGA display (640x480, size unspecified), and 40 MB (interface unspecified, probably IDE) hard drive for $6,299, no FPU, OS extra.
This same Dell system with a 150 MB hard drive, SVGA color display (800x600, size unspecified), and 8 MB RAM cost around $7,000 ($5,900 for 150 MB SVGA, +$600 for 4 MB RAM; 8 MB, I presume, would cost another $600×4/(4-1) = $800 or so).
Adding a $500 387/25 FPU (based on ads in the back of the same BYTE[2]) and a $500 Dell UNIX license[3] brings the cost of our Dell system to $8,000, so within 20% or so of NeXT.
Unlike Dell, NeXT also bundled a variety of high-quality developer tools (Allegro Common Lisp and Sybase SQL Server in addition to the expected GNU C/ObjC toolchain, Interface Builder, and NS class libraries), useful application software (Mathematica, WriteNow, Mail.app), and convenient reference works (dictionary, thesaurus, book of quotations, complete works of Shakespeare, product docs).
Finally, NeXT charged $3,695 to upgrade the Cube's internal hard drive from 40 MB to 330 MB, which makes Apple SSD upgrade pricing sound entirely reasonable, as a comparable upgrade from a hypothetical 512 GB to 4 TB NeXT SSD would cost almost $3,000.
[1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1987-06/page/n134/...
[2] See, e.g., page 178 of
https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/199001_Byte_Magazine_Vol_1...
(warning: slow PDF link)
[3] https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1992/0706.html
The NeXTStep layer was really the only selling point. And in hindsight that was enough. But the hardware itself? Only barely worth remembering.