A little more historical context. Rhapsody had two or three big problems:
- There was no transition plan for Mac apps other than Blue Box emulation. Adobe, Quark, Microsoft were the essential Mac developers and all of them completely refused to port to AppKit, full stop.
- Adobe refused to license Display PostScript under terms that would make it possible to ship as a consumer OS (supposedly they didn’t want to support DPS anymore, and refused to budge on a high per-seat price, as a way of tanking it the entire thing).
- Rhapsody was slower than classic MacOS on a wide variety of tasks, and unusable for others. The UI was a weird mashup of NeXT and Mac idioms
Note that it took until 2003 or 2004 for Mac OS X to become usable for non-technical end users. OpenStep had a lot of rough edges for non-Unix people; Rhapsody was the (false) start of a _long_ journey. (Ironically, given better engineering management, Apple could have shipped Copland well before then.)
- There was no transition plan for Mac apps other than Blue Box emulation. Adobe, Quark, Microsoft were the essential Mac developers and all of them completely refused to port to AppKit, full stop.
- Adobe refused to license Display PostScript under terms that would make it possible to ship as a consumer OS (supposedly they didn’t want to support DPS anymore, and refused to budge on a high per-seat price, as a way of tanking it the entire thing).
- Rhapsody was slower than classic MacOS on a wide variety of tasks, and unusable for others. The UI was a weird mashup of NeXT and Mac idioms
Note that it took until 2003 or 2004 for Mac OS X to become usable for non-technical end users. OpenStep had a lot of rough edges for non-Unix people; Rhapsody was the (false) start of a _long_ journey. (Ironically, given better engineering management, Apple could have shipped Copland well before then.)