1996 is not now. This comparision makes little to no sense.

I'm sure if Apple provided support for installing your own OS on their M series laptops it would be incredibly popular. And I don't need to guess at this using weird 1996 research on microkernels because Asahi Linux exists and clearly there is interest in it.

Indeed, Apple from 1996 would not released Tahoe, most likely.

We don't need research because QNX, L4 and many others on embedded space do exist as well.

Do you forget what Apple in '96 was? Or are you saying that Tahoe is too polished for the Apple of '96?

Apple was not a bastion of quality in the 90's. They couldn't modernize the Mac OS, and that continued with little more than window dressing over what was released in the 80's. The Mac line up was a horrible mess of barely different models that needed a Ph.D to figure out what was different. The company was bleeding money and seriously close to bankruptcy.

The Apple of the mid 90's wishes it could release something like Tahoe.

Yes the 1996 Apple was on the edge of bankruptcy, yet Mac OS 8 was definitely much more polished than Tahoe.

Ya ok, unless you looked at it wrong, then it crashed.

OS 8 was a platinum theme over System 7. Which was a slightly better System 6, which wasn't significantly different than System 4.

System 7 was good for the time, OS 8 and 9 were not, and Apples inability to improve the OS were really starting to show. Windows 95 was a more stable OS than OS 8. Tahoe is better.

How many Tahoe related radar issues do you want?

Yeah - an OS that crashed every time you launched Netscape and you as an end user had to manually allocate memory to apps?

Not to mention that the OS itself was still mostly 68K emulated code even on PPC Macs and holding the mouse down over the menu caused all apps to stop running.

At least you could read the text and resize windows.

Apple circa 1996 would be charging for its updates and licensing out the software to Power Computing and UMAX. They were making a lot of "interesting" decisions.

They still are doing lots of interesting decisions, the difference is that now the piggy bank is full to care of them going badly.

Rip Blackberry Phone + QNX, you were so promising for such a short time.

> difficult installation process and the significant performance costs

So it was a failure in implementation.

And the Apple that delivered Tahoe will do better?

All they would need is to provide complete DTBs and some drivers, no need to write a new OS from scratch.