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Comment by PrairieFire | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s a quiet but deliberate strategy to keep macOS the spiritual successor to NeXTSTEP. While many of Jobs principles are under pressure at current day Apple, his ghost lives on.

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I think you mean literal successor. It's descended from NeXT's codebase. Mac OS X 10.0 was basically NeXTSTEP 6 with Apple logos, Carbon and a Mac OS 9 VM.

There's a "ship of theseus" problem with this idea. There's enough different about OS X (different kernel and BSD base, different display server, different driver stack) that I think it's fair to describe it as a separate OS, yet clearly a lot _is_ directly taken from NS, especially the ObjC/application layer stuff. The waters are further muddled by the existence of Rhapsody and OS X Server 1.0, which are much more clearly "NeXTSTEP 6 with Apple logos, Carbon and a Mac OS 9 VM". I don't think anyone outside the original OS X development team really knows just how much code was kept vs scrapped for the start of OS X development. Given that NS/OS was based on USL-encumbered BSD, it seems likely to me that nothing from the original NS kernel was kept for that, at a minimum.

That's why I said 6, Rhapsody/OS X Server is 5. The kernel is/was the same kernel as NeXTSTEP just updated. The main differences were Carbon, Display PDF instead of Display Postscript and the new theme.

This also doesn’t explain anything? Is getting Unix certified a jobs principle or a requirement to be a “spiritual successor”?

Jobs was very much anti-UNIX and is relatively easy to find it out.

NeXTSTEP had to support UNIX, because that was the workstation market they were after.

However notice how everything relevant for NeXT products was based on Objective-C userspace tooling and frameworks.

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