This entire subthread is silly. - BeOS was not a great choice, though certain aspects were much better than NeXT, primarily the filesystem. There were a lot of

This entire subthread is silly. - BeOS was not a great choice, though certain aspects were much better than NeXT, primarily the filesystem. There were a lot of things missing, but BeOS's lack of printer support was the headline issue; seems ridiculous today, but "desktop publishing" still mattered to Apple at the time, and it spoke to immaturity of the BeOS graphics stack. - Aside from WebObjects, the vaunted NeXT software stack was bitrotting. It was buggy and unstable on commodity PC hardware, and it was never polished enough for non-Unix-savvy end users. Apple spent something like six years bringing it up to a consumer-ready spec before they felt comfortable dropping classic Mac OS. - The original iPod used no NeXT-derived software. - But without the NeXT purchase, Apple wouldn't have gotten Steve back. - Without Steve back at Apple, the iPod wouldn't have existed. - Without the iPod, you don't get the iPhone.