[simondotau]

Apple and the Macintosh platform was on a downhill trajectory in the mid-1990s. Whether a hypothetical Be acquisition could have resulted in a successful operating system is kind of moot, because there's nothing to suggest that a Be acquisition would have arrested the overall decline.

The high order bit in Apple's resurgence was Steve Jobs. He's mostly known for his charisma on stage, but he was instrumental in restructuring the company from the ground up.

Despite early pains, the NeXT technology stack has proven to be an incredibly capable platform which has served Apple extraordinarily well as the basis for two decades of macOS development, and as the software foundation for the iPhone and iPad. The fact that it was underpinned by UNIX was how the Mac got taken seriously by developers in the mid-2000s.