I wouldn't call Rhapsody a dead end; it took more work than expected but it evolved into OS X. And the delays were worth it because OS X solved a bunch of the thorny problems described in this document.

> And the delays were worth it

Agreed — I love Rhapsody's alternate-history NeXT vibe because I was a Mac user but never a NeXT user, so it's interesting to glimpse a timeline where the NeXT genes were more dominant. I'm glad we got the OS X we got because the OS X we got was actually successful. They pulled off Carbon amazingly well.

I 'member upgrading my WallStreet PowerBook (already a pretty old machine by 2001) to 128MB of RAM and installing 10.0 when it first came out, and I've been revisiting early OS X again on that same machine recently: https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/15s67e8/266_m...