Re:Windows NT for Power Macintosh
by lproven on Saturday July 13, 2024 @07:17AM
(#40953397)
I agree both with @snakeyjake and with @faefox.
I'd love to see what Apple would have done... but at the same time I fear very much it would have killed Apple.
BeOS was amazing, but its dev tools were nothing special while NeXT's were state of the art, industry-beating. That means no way to win Mac developers over to the new OS.
BeOS was as insecure as Classic MacOS, so no way to crack the server market (not that that worked) and no way to build nice locked-down little gadgets like iPhones.
And while Be had JLG, a very smart cookie, NeXT had Jobs, who had more vision in a day than JLG in a year.
Me, I wish a disappointed Be had done a deal with Acorn and ported to Arm.
Arms in the hundreds-of-MHz range were there and gigahertz-class was coming soon. Acorn had prototype multi-processor machines. Be had the best SMP support in the business in the late 1990s.
They could have reskinned BeOS to look more RISC OS like, run RO in a VM like OS X ran Classic in a VM, and offered both the thinnest lightest Web-capable laptops in the world, and compellingly-priced multiprocessor desktop workstations that didn't need a dozen cooling fans and could have gone to 4-way or even 8-way at an affordable price, which x86 and PowerPC chips could not touch.
I'd love to see what Apple would have done... but at the same time I fear very much it would have killed Apple.
BeOS was amazing, but its dev tools were nothing special while NeXT's were state of the art, industry-beating. That means no way to win Mac developers over to the new OS.
BeOS was as insecure as Classic MacOS, so no way to crack the server market (not that that worked) and no way to build nice locked-down little gadgets like iPhones.
And while Be had JLG, a very smart cookie, NeXT had Jobs, who had more vision in a day than JLG in a year.
Me, I wish a disappointed Be had done a deal with Acorn and ported to Arm.
Arms in the hundreds-of-MHz range were there and gigahertz-class was coming soon. Acorn had prototype multi-processor machines. Be had the best SMP support in the business in the late 1990s.
They could have reskinned BeOS to look more RISC OS like, run RO in a VM like OS X ran Classic in a VM, and offered both the thinnest lightest Web-capable laptops in the world, and compellingly-priced multiprocessor desktop workstations that didn't need a dozen cooling fans and could have gone to 4-way or even 8-way at an affordable price, which x86 and PowerPC chips could not touch.