Being UNIX was never part of neither Apple or NeXT's culture, it was more a way to get a foot into the workstation market, and a question of survival in not closing doors.
Now they are way beyond that, so they can focus on what was the soul of Mac design during the System days.
> Being UNIX was never part of neither Apple or NeXT's culture
Why do you say this? True, Mach is architecturally different from the BSD kernel but user space started out as NetBSD and its still fundamentally a POSIX system.
I never worked for either company but have worked with NeXT and Apple engineering teams on projects and wouldn’t say that I was working with people who took a non-Unix orientation, especially when compared, say, to Windows.
Would you not have considered AIX Unix? Or Unicos? People considered that Unix but it was more alien than the macos due to then constraints of the hardware.
What mattered on A/UX for application developers on Apple platforms was the System APIs layer ported to run on top of X Windows integration.
Likewise, anyone doing NeXT development was focused on Objective-C frameworks all the way down to driver kit.
As Application developer on a NeXT, the tune was all about WebObjects, Renderman, EOF.
Applications like Lotus Improv, Wingz, and those being put out by Omni Group were the meat of the kind of applications that people considered to use NeXTSTEP, not BSD command line utilities.
Pretty much patent on commercials like NeXT vs Sun.
AIX is definitly UNIX, because it isnt' like A/UX, NeXTSTEP, OS X or iOS, where the UNIX layer is there more to bring stuff into the platform, while the main developer stack is something else.
Just like there is nothing UNIX about Gnome or KDE. I don’t really get your point. You try hard but the fact is that macOS has a very strong UNIX underpinning with zero signs that it is going away.
UNIX is not going away, you are the one trying to put words on my typing.
I am talking about the Apple developers culture, from those developers that care about Apple platforms, regardless of what powers the bottom layer of the OS.
UNIX can exist until the end of days at Apple, that is not what matters to Apple application developers.
As for GNOME and KDE, they are lego pieces on Linux, a fragmented experience where the command line is worshipped, for most users running something else doesn't matter, or they even change environment every couple of days, this is not what Apple culture is about.
I don’t understand what you mean, macOS and iOS share the same kernel. They are both POSIX UNIX.
Also, macOS isn’t going to stop being UNIX based, it’s XNU/Mach based on BSD, that’s not going to change without a entirely new OS written from scratch.
What’s not UNIX about Swift/Xcode, it’s just a language / app, what don’t I get here.
Do you think they want to abandon Unix and roll their own OS from scratch?
Of course, it is not going to stop being UNIX, except for the little detail that POSIX is mostly irrelevant for what is sold on Apple store for any kind of their devices.
This is the ecosystem that Apple and developers that buy into Apple ecosystem care about.
Those that were buying Macs to do GNU/Linux work were a welcomed addition in times of need, that is all.
I advise reading books like The Cult of Mac and Folklore.
AppKit apps can and do interact with POSIX APIs all the time. Apple can't just pull the rug out from under them like Google might do with Android apps, for example.
Can you make an application on Linux using POSIX APIs? How about on Android? Your argument seems to be macOS is not a UNIX because POSIX doesn’t specify a GUI toolkit, but this is quite frankly absurd.
What is absurd is the way every UNIX afficionado is trying to turn my words around.
I talk about the culture of the application developers and what Apple developers that are on the platform since the System days care about, and keep being told Mac OS X is an UNIX.
Of course it is one, that is not the point being made.
And? The kernel and a couple of shell utilities don't dictate the developer culture, those developers that actually care about Apple ecosystem, not those that buy Apple hardware as pretty Linux replacements.
You were arguing that they didn't care about UNIX, which is demonstrably false, and they went to great lengths to get their OS certified; it is the core of their operating systems. This has been pointed out several times now.
You're right from the point of view of a GUI application developper, the UNIX core is somewhat hidden under intermediate layers, but then it's also the case for applications on Linux. Using GTK or QT, you don't deal with low-level kernel APIS much beyond POSIX either. And you can also do that on macOS, so it's a bit pointless as a purity test.
It seems difficult to argue with a straight face that Apple's developers working on the kernel, low-level layers and system libraries don't care about UNIX: that is their whole job. And as a user, you can have UNIX and decent GUIs.
That is a tiny slice of the OS, and macOS wouldn't be macOS without Objective-C / Swift frameworks, whereas GNU/Linux is still GNU/Linux regardless of what one puts on top of the Linux kernel.
macOS being UNIX was never in discussion, as mentioned it helps sales.
Now they are way beyond that, so they can focus on what was the soul of Mac design during the System days.