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NeXT Lives -- In Apple
mikey writes: "vnunnet.com has an
interesting article about Steve Jobs; his love for cubes, a bit of a history behind NeXT, why it failed, also why it was so way ahead of its time, also some Bill Gates stuff. All in all, a great piece, and to give Slashdot readers some insight into what was NeXT, and how now it has basically taken over Apple."
I've been a NeXT developer for over ten years. I've seen it /all/ -- the (for the time) mind-blowing hardware, the bad business decisions, the wrong turns and the beautiful, beautiful devleopment environment and OO frameworks. What a ride!
While some of the spirit of NeXT - an elitist, snobby, extremely weird and secretive company for rock star coders and Jobs cultists - lives on to a degree today at Apple, most of the really central people have either retired or scattered to the wind (Bud Tribble, William Parkhurst, Keith Ohlfs). Avie is still around, of course, but he and guys like Bertrand Serlet are really the last of the old guard. NeXT always had top-shelf engineers, though.
In truth, what really killed NeXT was Java. Although the Java 2 class libraries available today that have comparable peers in the NeXT Foundation/WebObjects/Enterprise Objects and AppKit frameworks are almost universally inferior to what Apple is going to ship as the "Cocoa" development environment on Mac OSX, Apple has largely squandered the promise of Cocoa already because it has sat on this rich legacy from NeXT while Java slowly took over the world of enterprise software development. Today, the few people who can be arsed to learn Objective-C don't even bother to put it on a resume. Very sad, but Apple's marketing team just never had the balls to fight Sun. As far as writing Cocoa apps in Java - why bother? Might as well write pure Java apps. Therein dies the last of NeXT.
All that said, I really miss the company. NeXT made some of the most exciting computer products ever released. That it was a dysfunctional organization and a money-losing operation is ultimately beside the point. I find it very sad that companies that made truly amazing machines, and tried to do extraordinary things (ie NeXT, SGI) were severely punished for it and gray box makers without a single idea in their heads (Dell, Microsoft) thrived. Oh well, that's the "genius of the market" for you.
In the end, I like to think of the company as a success anyway. NeXT computers will be in glass cases in museums a hundred years from now and people will still ooh and ahh at them. And if someone turns one on, bet your last nickel that the little matte black magnesium monolith will find some way to boot and run.
Say what you will about Steve Jobs and NeXT, but you won't see their like again in your lifetime.
Nightspore
Be is a visually appealing OS (IMHO, of course), and is easy to create simple apps with. Many of the aspects of it's OS design are great, as well.
Unfortunately, it came about in a time when there was already a standard (Microsoft). People who didn't want to use that standard, for whatever reason, still had Macs. To make matters worse, Linux was really starting to get a buzz, and drawing exactly the type of people BeOS would want.
And there were problems...It is closed source, so FSF types didn't want it. And old Amiga users didn't care about it after it went solely to the x86 platform. (It was originally supposed to be the new Amiga, or an OS styled after Amiga, or whatever.)
So they effectively alienated (almost) everyone they could sell to, and are now left as an example of what not to do, much like NeXT.
The NeXT software was an excellent and practical engineering achievement: it married Smalltalk-like object-oriented technology with the C language and a UNIX kernel. By industry standards (i.e., compared to Windows, MacOS, and UNIX) it also had good tools and a good development environment.
But it wasn't second to none. The NeXT machine, like the Macintosh that preceded it, mostly just took selected aspects from Smalltalk and similar systems and brought the to the masses on a more mainstream platform. But the originals actually arguably had better development tools and a better runtime.
The NeXT machine was a smartly packaged, excellent practical compromise. Jobs deserves a lot of credit for good taste and practicality. But it wasn't breakthrough or even particularly novel technology given the systems that preceded it by nearly a decade. And, of course, reasonable as it was technically, it was still considered too radical and too expensive by industry.
The real missed opportunity of the 1980's was probably Smalltalk. Sun had actually apparently considered bundling Smalltalk-80 with every Sun workstation sold, but the deal fell through. The world of computing would be a very different place if the graduate students of the 1980's and early 1990's had grown up with that software on their Sun workstations.
As someone with a NeXTcube currently sitting right next to me, running a screensaver, acting as a print server, and telling me the time, I'm excited about OSX because in it, I see NeXTStep ressurected. It's the only thing that Apple has ever done that's gotten me excited. With the coming of their new G4s (which, make no mistake, kick the living crap out of most any Intel processor out there) and their sleek laptops, I think that Apple has a fighting chance. Don't believe the FUD, Apple is doing okay. It's been a hard quarter for everybody. Don't think that this single quarter of loss is going to sink them.
/bin/truth is out there.
In fact, I'm one of those people that will jump ship from Linux to use OSX. It's got the right underlying guts (BSD 4.4), it's got a pretty interface, it's got a bad-ass programming environment. A macintosh can be a real programming platform, instead of the toy that MacOS has made it for so many years.
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The
Of course they will make money on the Titanium - in fact, they will probabily make a killing on it. The PowerBook has always been a high-margin item, and I doubt that they would sacrifice this. Whoever wrote this article forgot a few things:
The G4 Processor has a much smaller die size than the x86 competitors. It can be manufactured more cheaply - especially now that they have been getting good yields at lower speeds.
Apple owns a sizeable portion of Korea's Samsung electronics, which is the company that manufactures those larger screens. Therefore they are in a much better position to get a sweet deal on those screens than many other manufacturers.
The Titanium case will actually cut down on many costs. Sure, the material itself is cheaper, but think about this: most laptops today have a plastic outer skin molded over a magnesium or aluminum skeleton. This process requires two sets of machines, and two toolings to do - both very expensive. By going to a hard, titanium "exoskeleton", you can eliminate one of the toolings by eliminating the inner skeleton. Furthermore, assembly is made much easier, since the parts simply "bolt-on" to the case, rather than being bolted first to the skeleton, and then to the plastic case.
There are many other ingenious ways that they've been able to save money on the product, but I don't have time to list them now. Obviously, the person who wrote the article had not even considered the obvious.
The 500MHz PPC is a fast chip. Keep in mind that many of the x86 processors were "artifically" increased to 1GHz. They do that by lengthening the processor's pipelines. This increases the clock speed, but at the same time the processor is doing less work for every clock. The G4s in these laptops are the same ones in the desktops. The chips that AMD and Intel are producing are actually hobbled. Transmeta's chips haven't been well accepted in the marketplace yet, as they haven't been able to live up to the hype. I'd say that Apple has a pretty decent machine here and I think that they'll sell alot of them. There's been a pent up demand for a G4 laptop for quite some time now.
The article did not mention but NeXT/Steve Jobs has the honor of being the first significant GPL violator. Jobs took gcc as the system compiler for NextStep. NeXT added Objective C support but tried to keep it proprietary. After a stand-off with the FSF/RMS NeXT donated the Objective C compiler to GNU.
Today gcc is still the system compiler of Mac OS X. Steve Jobs depends on the work of Richard Stallman for his OS.
Free Software: the software by the people, of the people and for the people. Develop! Share! Enhance! Enjoy!
Apple is non-existant here. Be is turning into a BIG player. (Sony, Qubit, Compaq, Intel, and FIC, to name a few recent deals.)
wow, you need a reality check. have you been following the embedded market at all? Be is a drop in the bucket. QNX, WindRiver WinCE and Linux all completely swamp Be in marketshare and in design wins. i work at a company that designs chips for the IA market -- i know it very well. i have yet to hear a single one of our clients (including Compaq and Sony) mention Be. they're all designing around Linux right now (and quite frankly, i think Linux is the best solution. i push it whenever possible).
the IA market is very volitile right now, and over 90% of the IA appliances, even from the big companies, don't make it to market, and of those that do, very few have taken off. so when you see these product announcements from Be, take them with a grain of salt. i'm not seeing Be in any of major designs that i've dealt with, so i highly doubt they'll be dwarfing Apple anytime soon.
i was a huge fan of Be, but their inability to choose a market segment (high end audio, no! high-end graphics! no, consumer workstations, no! internet applicances, yeah!) is making a complete mockery of the great concepts they've designed in the OS. i think the best thing to happen to them right now would be to go out of business and opensource their code. at least then their great ideas would find a niche, because it's obvious that their marketing crew can't figure out what to do with it.
- j