Also at a given point, they were actually trying to compete into the UNIX workstation market, as a couple of Amiga engineering folks were really into UNIX.
Thankfully that never materialized as such, otherwise AmigaOS wouldn't turned out as special as it was, rather yet another clone, SGI style.
I’m wondering how this worked out so well for Apple 15 years later (A/UX notwithstanding of course) - perhaps unix was simply not mature enough at that stage
Easy, Linux folks got a laptop/desktop that actually works out of the box, and they weren't really into Linux religion, rather whatever does POSIX would do.
A lesson taken by Microsoft years later, as Project Astoria ashes got repurposed as WSL.
A/UX failed due to management, and politics between IBM and Apple.
It worked out well for NeXT. But it took a long time, NeXTSTEP was released at the end of the 80s. So it took them more than a decade and reverse take-over of Apple, together with the much more affordable Apple hardware.
Thankfully that never materialized as such, otherwise AmigaOS wouldn't turned out as special as it was, rather yet another clone, SGI style.