Make no mistake I would have loved mass market NExT. Multitasking. Vast memory. Graphics performance only dreamed of in the pc world. Once they started shipping with a HD instead of the optical 20mb cartridge disk jt had everything one would want in a power machine.
The optical disk was such a terrible choice. As an option? Sure. As the primary disk for a system reliant — like nothing that came before it — on fast swapping to virtual memory for interactive perf? Yikes.
(Of course, it was also fundamentally a Unix workstation and still had a lot of rough edges that the classic Mac, for example, didn’t have. And those edges were so rough they didn’t get fully sanded down until approx. Mac OS X 10.2 - 10.4.)
There was a rumour that I have never been able to validate that Steve Jobs had a shirt with an oversized pocket so he could say the floptical disk would fit in a pocket.
(Of course, it was also fundamentally a Unix workstation and still had a lot of rough edges that the classic Mac, for example, didn’t have. And those edges were so rough they didn’t get fully sanded down until approx. Mac OS X 10.2 - 10.4.)
Forever an urban legend I supose.