[andrewf]

This presumes that Apple brought in Jobs as a decision maker, and NeXTSTEP was attached baggage. At the time, the reverse was true - Apple purchased NeXTSTEP as their future OS, and Jobs came along for the ride. Given the disaster that was Apple's OS initiatives in the 90s, I doubt the Apple board would have bought into a Linux adventure.

[lunarlull]

Why wouldn't Apple have been interested in a Linux option? They bought NeXTSTEP because of Jobs. Linux was already useable as a desktop OS in 2000, and they could have added in the UX stuff and drivers for their particular macs on top of it. There wouldn't have been any downsides for them, and it would have strengthened something that was hurting their biggest rival.

[musicale]

> Linux was already useable as a desktop OS in 2000

Apple made its decision in 1996.

[pjmlp]

Not only was the acquisition during the 1990's, as someone that happened to be a Linux zealot up to around 2004, usable was quite relative in 2000, if one had the right desktop parts.

And it only became usable as Solaris/AIX/HP-UX replacement thanks to the money IBM, Oracle and Compaq pumped into Linux's development around 2000, it is even on the official timeline history.

[icedchai]

In the early 2000's, Linux was practically unusable as a desktop OS because the only "fully functional" web browser was Internet Explorer. Netscape 4.x "worked" but was incredibly unstable and crashed roughly every half hour. Mozilla / Phoenix / Firefox wasn't done yet. Chrome didn't exist.

It was a very different world. We won't even talk about audio and video playback. I was an early Linux user, having done my first install in 1993, and sadly ran Windows on my desktop then because the Linux desktop experience was awful.

[f33d5173]

Safari came out in 2003.

[icedchai]

Yeah, but I didn't use a Mac back then. And early 2000's web development was heavily biased towards IE.

[wpm]

Jobs initially did not want to come back to Apple. Apple bought NeXTSTEP because between it and BeOS, Jean-Louis Gassee overplayed his hand and was asking way too much money for the acquisition. Apple then defaulted to NeXT. Jobs thought Apple was hopeless just like everyone else did at the time and didn't want to take over a doomed company to steer it into the abyss, and it's not like NeXT was doing great at the time.

>There wouldn't have been any downsides for them

Really? NO downsides???

- throwing away a decade and a half of work and engineering experience (Avie Tevanian helped write Mach, this is like having Linus being your chief of software development and saying "just switch to Hurd!")

- uncertain licensing (Apple still ships ancient bash 3.2 because of GPL)

- increased development time to a shipping, modern OS (it already took them 5 years to ship 10.0, and it was rough)

That's just off the top of my head. I believe you think there wouldn't have been any downsides because you didn't stop to think of any, or are ideaologically disposed to present the Linux kernel in 1996 as being better or safer than XNU.

[_rpf]

> Jean-Louis Gassee overplayed his hand

Well, there’s a parallel universe! Beige boxes running BeOS late-90s-cool maybe, but would we still have had the same upending results for mobile phones, industrial design, world integration, streaming media services…

[DeathArrow]

>it would have strengthened something that was hurting their biggest rival.

If by biggest rival you mean Microsoft, it was Microsoft who saved Apple from bancrupcy in 1997.

[kfir]

Microsoft did that not out of charity to Apple but as an attempt to fend off the DOJ trial accusing it of being a monopoly

[philistine]

The investment Microsoft famously made in Apple in 1997 did not prevent Apple from going bankrupt. By the time the money was in Apple's accounts, its fortunes were already reversed.

The fact Microsoft announced they were investing, and that they were committed to continue shipping Office to Mac, definitely helped.