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Devil's advocate: If Be became OSX, we probably wouldn't have ever seen the iPod, iPhone or iPad.



What makes you say that? I think BeOS / OSX could've been a fantastic embedded platform to build an iOS type device around.


Steve Jobs wouldn't have been brought back to the company. (But that's not a commentary about the technology.)


Tiles answered the main part of your question (Steve Jobs), but to respond to the embedded part, Palm never did anything useful that I know of with their purchase of BeOS, which is unfortunate.


By the time Palm bought Be Inc., they had all but stopped doing anything useful with anything. Other than the Treo smartphone line they bought from Handspring, they only had a few good models from 2002-2005, and since then they've only achieved notability by not going bankrupt and instead getting bought.


Not only that but you have a world of C++ developers that would have been able to develop for a BeOS type iPod/iPhone/iPad and not ObjC.




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