Apple had a much bigger market. They had problems with mismanagement to be sure but every designer, many authors and photographers, tons of schools, etc. had Macs on their desks. That gave them enough revenue to get a new OS out the door, and the industrial design on the iMac and Titanium PowerBook were enough to keep sales up during the bridge period.
I worked on an internet appliance using BeOS around 2000. The device worked, but was unfortunately slow due to the compromises Sony had to make to hit their price point (most notably running the display in portrait mode without hardware rotation, meaning every paint had to rotate in software!) and the lack of software really contributed - the NetPositive browser was fast and had some nice ideas but you’d run into more sites which would have worked in Netscape or Internet Explorer and didn’t have Flash.
I really liked BeOS: BFS’ database-like capabilities are still unmatched and it was years ahead of the curve on stability (I remember crashing the graphics driver & watching it restart, the open apps repainted, and I kept working) and consistent performance (Windows and macOS still have more UI lag under load despite much faster hardware). The fatal flaws, however, were the lack of permissions and immature networking. It was also harder to port Unix software, which mattered a lot at the time since that meant a ton of technical workers could use a Mac with OS X but not a BeOS system. I’m not sure what the assessment was for running Classic Mac apps either but suspect that already hard task would have been harder with a more limited OS. Even at the time I thought Apple made the right call, much as it meant I couldn’t unload some Be shares I’d picked up at a profit.
Not for Portuguese designer, many authors and photographers, tons of schools,...
We only had one Apple official reseller store in Lisbon for the whole country, and outside a couple of university labs and companies with headquarters on the capital, they were only seen on computer magazines.
Oh, definitely. My experience at the time is limited to the United States where you had things like “Apples for the teachers” programs where you could save supermarket receipts and the store would donate a percent of the combined total to the local school in the form of new Macs. Those niches were Apple’s air supply.
I worked on an internet appliance using BeOS around 2000. The device worked, but was unfortunately slow due to the compromises Sony had to make to hit their price point (most notably running the display in portrait mode without hardware rotation, meaning every paint had to rotate in software!) and the lack of software really contributed - the NetPositive browser was fast and had some nice ideas but you’d run into more sites which would have worked in Netscape or Internet Explorer and didn’t have Flash.
I really liked BeOS: BFS’ database-like capabilities are still unmatched and it was years ahead of the curve on stability (I remember crashing the graphics driver & watching it restart, the open apps repainted, and I kept working) and consistent performance (Windows and macOS still have more UI lag under load despite much faster hardware). The fatal flaws, however, were the lack of permissions and immature networking. It was also harder to port Unix software, which mattered a lot at the time since that meant a ton of technical workers could use a Mac with OS X but not a BeOS system. I’m not sure what the assessment was for running Classic Mac apps either but suspect that already hard task would have been harder with a more limited OS. Even at the time I thought Apple made the right call, much as it meant I couldn’t unload some Be shares I’d picked up at a profit.