BeOS almost made Apple a different company (2015)
Trivia: And what open source OS was the Sidekick?<p>I am one of those idiots who still believe Apple is a hardware company and as with all hardware companies, software is an afterthought.<p>When they ditched OS9 for BSD this reinforced my belief.<p>I honestly believe without BSD there would be no NeXTSTEP&#x2F;OSX&#x2F;iOS&#x2F;macOS&#x2F;watchOS&#x2F;tvOS, etc.  This article suggests they could have used BeOS.  But, they did not.<p>My hope has always been that Apple would <i>optionally</i> sell hardware without a pre-installed BSD&#x2F;Mach-derived OS, allowing users to install their own choice of OS.<p>For example, a fully open source BSD with a BSD kernel.  That would be my choice but other users might choose differently.<p>I am not interested so much in the graphics capabilities of Apple HW.  I am after the form factor.