ndiddy

What you're describing is how the watch market bifurcated after quartz watches came out. Mechanical watches were previously utilitarian devices, made to be as thin as possible and sold at a premium because they were the most accurate timekeeping devices that could be possibly made at that size. If you had a large watch, it meant it was cheap. After quartz watches came out, mechanical watches could no longer compete on size, accuracy, or features, so they took their current role of being personal accessories for men, a sort of socially acceptable jewelry. They got larger and flashier because the point of the watch became personal expression (or social signalling at the high end) rather than simply telling the time.

Well the parent commenter said "SE era machines". That era of machines (Plus, SE, Classic) had an 8 MHz 68000 and only supported up to 4 MB of RAM. The Low End Mac page you linked says that your Classic II is 1.8x faster than an SE. On the 68000 Macs, System 7 (especially 7.1 and 7.5) feels a lot more sluggish than System 6, and will use over half the RAM just running the OS with no applications. Being able to skip the "extras" you mention that became mandatory on System 7 is useful when you have a slow machine with limited RAM. Of course I'm not sure what any of this has to do with running the OS on a Raspberry Pi.

How did you implement that? Is it like a modified emulator with your enhancements added? How does the System 6 cooperatively multitasking stuff interoperate with the posix stuff?

The old school way to do I/O on desktop was via the parallel port, which I imagine would still work if you get a PCIe parallel port card. For a more modern way, the FT232H chip supports UART, SPI, I2C, JTAG and raw GPIO over USB, and there are break-out boards available.

Some former Be employees have commented here in the past saying that Apple made the right decision to buy Next and not Be from a technical perspective, as BeOS had poor code quality and was far behind NEXTSTEP in important areas like networking and printing. They also implemented the OS API directly in C++, which tied them to a specific C++ compiler (some mid-90s version of GCC) due to the ABI getting broken in newer versions. The 32-bit version of Haiku (modern BeOS reimplementation) supports BeOS software, and as a result still needs to be compiled with that mid-90s GCC release.

Beyond that, I'm not sure if buying Be would have fixed the managerial problems at Apple. Would they have been able to add the required features to BeOS to turn it into a production OS without the project turning into another Copland? Would the existing Apple management have slimmed down the massive Apple product line that had dozens of nearly identical models? Would it have gotten rid of dead-end projects like Newton and Pippin? Etc.

I imagine the conversation went something like:

"Hey dad, what's this trip I hear you talking about?"

"Well son, even though you're 8 years old, I've decided to spend the next 28 years walking around the world."

"Gee dad, that sure seems like a long walk. Are you sure about this?"

"Well of course I'll be taking breaks rather than doing the whole thing at once."

"Great, so you'll be able to visit me, your 8 year old son, right?"

"Nope! I've decided to add my own self-imposed rule that I can't visit the UK until I've completed my walk. Instead, whenever I don't feel like walking, I'm going to fly to Mexico and hang out there. Then when I do feel like walking again, I'll fly back to where I was and resume my walk."

"So you're leaving me, your 8 year old son, to go on a 28 year long, non-contiguous walk around the world where you'll rarely see me? And by the time I grow up we'll barely know each other? And you'll end up missing the birth of your granddaughter?"

"That's right, son! I hope you're excited for the first of 4 times we'll see each other, 6 years from now! Aren't you proud of your dad for being such a great explorer?"

"..."

Windows 10 reversed a lot of the controversial UI changes from Windows 8, but the mouse/keyboard UX was still largely a regression from Windows 7 due to the introduction of giant padding regions on any new/redesigned software so people could use their fingers. Maybe people haven't noticed this as much because the economics have worked out such that most software is now designed for web/mobile first, so having giant padding regions on desktop is more normal.

Macs had managed to avoid this degradation for a while because they didn't have touchscreens, but Apple put in the giant finger-friendly padding regions as part of the UI changes in Tahoe, which got a lot of negative feedback. Now that they're introducing touchscreen laptops, it's unlikely that they'll ever fully revert those changes since it will make the touch experience worse.

It already has, see the massive increase in UI padding in Tahoe and later. Windows and GNOME both sacrificed their UX to support touchscreen laptops years ago, Apple was one of the holdouts before that point.

The Macbook Pro with M5 Pro/Max came out in March, while the Macbook Pro with M6 came out yesterday.