[giantrobot]

Apple was transitioning away from 68k by the time Linux was released. So 68k support wasn't really that useful to them.

In your original question I think you're forgetting the context of the Unix market of the time. It was the high Unix Wars and A/UX was a minority position of a minority player.

The buzzword of the decade was Object Oriented and anyone not elbows deep in an existing Unix was trying to build an OS around objects. It was entirely unclear if jumping on the Unix bandwagon at that time would have a future. Even with Apple's acquisition of NeXT it was their high level OpenStep that was of most interest rather than the BSD base layer.

[nxobject]

And with some success too: Cocoa/AppKit is still hanging around as an actual API that’s still being used by application programmers after 30 years, unlike winapi.