Most G4 & G5s are preempted by MorphOS users 
those talos things cost like they are made of gold, where as they are not. too much overpriced. as of that laptop, this page leaves the impression, itâs a kindergarten:
wow. intrigued. 
who would stay in doubts after such convincing arguments? âwas designed with more featuresâ. spherical features in vacuum. not serious.
Well itâs true that starting something 10 years later gives the possibility of not making the same mistakes and adding features correctly instead of shoehorning them (like, MMX reusing FPU regs on x86 forcing you to save themâŚ). Not to say that it ends up as a competitive advantage, nor that competition is always fair (spoiler: it never is, else weâd all be running BeOS on BeBoxen nowadays )âŚ
I was just pointing out that they are not unobtainium neither are ultra expensive⌠neither does running on Power require that you buy vintage hardware.
Talos is comparable to similar PC hardware.
And last I checked the OpenPower laptop wasnât targeting being a gold brick either.
If you primary goal is non x86 or having open firmware they are good targets⌠clearly not good targets if you are optimizing for value.
Everyone say that Be Inc. had to focus on x86. But actually they got the best tecnology for their time(power), acting with tecnical approach, then they choose the bigger market(x86), acting with a marketing appproach. Itâs a pity that Sun opened sparc in 2005 and not earlier. An open source cpu⌠Afaik now sparc is abandoned by his stepmother Oracle, and the only company carrying on sparc processors is Fujitsu. Iâve always seen sparc a viable third way (under sun an ethical approach) specially after V9 for desktop use. But these are words of a dreamer, not a designer, nor a developer, neither a electronic engineer.
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It took me long time to realize, the destop segment was just a side-gig for Be Inc. I dont think they was ever serious about that.
I donât think it was that it was a side gig, I think that it became a side gig too quickly.
tl;dr - Be Inc picked the wrong processor when they moved to PowerPC and it killed their hardware and desktop business. They then repeated the same mistake with the Internet Appliance business by sticking with Intel.
They were up against Microsoft in the desktop market and Microsoft of the 90âs ate little companies with niche OS for breakfast. They were blocked from the OEM market (and Be Inc got money for it after the company closed operations, save the one legal council that remained there to wind up their affairs - not that it helped them.)
The issue was this - they wanted to be like Next and Apple, but hardware is a terrible business to get in to without infrastructure. Look at what happened to Nextâs hardware business - and Jobs invested in factories to produce the hardware.
They went with the Hobbit processor, and AT&T killed it and they fell in to using PowerPC rather than Intel - which actually turned out to be the death of the entire company. This key decision set them back years and effectively killed they entire business. If they had chosen Intel, they might still be around now, because Intel PCâs and hardware was all available as off the shelf - all they needed was a board with 2 processors, and getting that made is a lot easier IMO than designing an entire custom board.The rest could be PCI and ISA cards.
So the rest goes like thisâŚthey designed and manufactured the Bebox. But it was hard. Margins were tight. The business was not viable. Someone had the idea to port to other PowerPC machines, and that seemed sane given the investment in PowerPC. Apple was courting third parties for their doomed clone program. Apple was failing hard. They needed a new OS, and Be knew this. They started to bank on selling the OS to Apple, as this seemed like it would work - as heck, the OS already ran on the hardware! But that failed because Jobs was a better prospect, and Next was more established. And as a âthank youâ present from Jobs and Apple, the rug got pulled again when they killed the clone program on Jobs return to Apple.
They could have partnered with Power Computing or someone like that to produce a new BeBox design, but that tied them in to what was effectively another hardware program - and I feel that the BeBox burned them so much that they decided that moving architecture would be safer.
They rushed R3 to Intel, and it more or less worked. But it was another dead end because the architecture they were using was based on PE format exes and that made the tooling horrible to work with and much more complicated. So they moved to ELF with R4 Intel. That burned a lot of early apps because there was no way to run anything from R3 on R4, yet on PowerPC you can still run stuff from PR1 and PR2 on R5.03.
They then went through the wilderness years of trying to make desktop sell. But that is not easy when you have the likes of Microsoft breathing down your neck constantly, trying to make you go away.
So, someone decided âletâs pivotâ and so the great âFocus Shiftâ happened and they started the Internet Appliance venture⌠10 - 15 years too soon. If they did it in 2010, if might have worked. But 2000 was a terrible time to be trying to make a small portable internet tablet device. And, with great irony, sticking with Intel basically killed them, because the Intel processors were really terrible at battery life. If they had used ARM or MIPS or something low powered, they would have been a lot better off.
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It makes sense!
I guess from reading all the history, I see the sudden end of the clone program differently as a fan of both Apple and Be⌠afaik, the cloning was stopped by Jobs in the interests of creating a very tight focus and to save the company â not to âpull out the rugâ from Be on purpose imho â although it did definitely have the end goal of âdeep-sixingâ the Mac clone companies. Still⌠I almost wish Apple could have been the ones to buy Be instead of Palm, revive the BeBox (and allowed Be to function as a partly independent subsidiary).
But the other sad thing is⌠Palm was brilliant imho (heck, Iâm a Palm fan too) but had bad management (i.e. the Foleo looked really cool as a foray into the netbook space, and then it was undermined as a âmobile companionâ and scrapped; the LifeDrive exHD was a great idea but badly executed and the microdrives had problems, the Treo/Centro messed around with Windows on a few devices instead of having one solid product line, Cobalt failed, the webOS-powered Pre was way ahead but launched too late, and so onâŚ) Saying all that because⌠I think Palm wouldâve had the right idea. Imagine BeOS on the Foleo and a line of professional netbooks and that could sync to Palmâs handhelds/pilots seamlessly with their touchstone charger and Bluetooth â if Palm wouldâve stayed alive, that would have been⌠awesomeness! 
Totally agree⌠I too think Be was way ahead of their time with the Internet Appliance idea â they could see it, but the technology to make devices thin and desirable was far from being there⌠and so it was a huge fail.
@apgreimann when Jobs killed the hardware clone business, Be lost access to all the documentation about the Apple devices being manufactured. It was at that point they stopped adding new PowerPC devices. I can even tell you the last models that were supported - the first revision of the 8600 and 9600. Apple changed the design of the motherboard on the last version of the 8600 and 9600 (the fastest revision) and made it incompatible, and from that point the not one further PowerPC model was supported that was not already based on an existing Apple reference design. No G3âs ever got any official support (I believe expansion cards worked in older Macs, and I heard very early Beige G3âs worked if you removed the personality card, though mine certainly didnât.) and not one New World Mac (anything from the original iMac onwards) was ever supported. No version of MacOS past 8.6 ever booted BeOS also. So basically, at that point, and given PReP and CHRP never happened, they put all PowerPC support on the back burner.
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Both Power and Sparc are equally open source at this point.
Fujitsu is focusing on ARM64 also though⌠Sparc64 is effectively legacy and or regulated to the embedded market at this point. Itâs still the go to processor for space applications and the ESA has been investing in it as late as last year with upgrades to leon5 which is 32bit sparc.
They moved to Intel after Intel had got reasonably modern CPUs (Pentium). In 1994 theyâd have worked with 386 or, at best, 486 systems.At that time dual-CPU boards were quite uncommon, and PCI bus also not that widespread either (1994 is the first year it started to be available).
So, itâs easy to say now that Intel would have been the best choice, but it wasnât so obvious at the time.
Also when they started the company, Microsoft was the only one managing to sell an OS to other people. Apple, NeXT, Commodore, Atari, Sun, everyone else in the 90s was selling the complete package of software + hardware. It made sense to do the same. Also remember that Linux didnât even exist and grew at about the same time as BeOS and probably a bit for the same reason: the wider deployment of Internet access.
So, yes, easy to see the wrong turns when looking back, but at the time it probably wasnât all that obvious.
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Apparently pentium was around in 93. Also, the PowerPC 603 chips they used in the BeBox were not actually compatible with SMP in hardware, and they had a software hack to make it work. It wasnât till the 604âs that they were capable of proper hardware SMP and no production BeBox ever had a 604 processor.
Edit, apparently both Supermicro and Tysn had dual processor socket 3 and 5 motherboards. So even 486 would have been possible.
The 604 was around when the BeBox was designed too, they just went with the cheaper one. Possibly it would have been the same with the x86 CPUs and they would have picked the older 486 rather than the new and costly Pentium.
Anyway, no one really knows what would have happened in this case. Maybe the Fujitsu FM-Towns can give some idea, as it is another somewhat PC compatible system with customizations.
True.
The FM Towns tanked due to the poor software library iirc. The NEC PC-98 would be a better comparison. NEC did really well with it. But both half wanted to be capable of running Windows and neither really had the OS going for them.
Re:603e ppc
The way I heard it described by an IBM engineer, BeOS targetted 2 603e PPCs because they were cheaper than an equivalent G3 PPC was by itself. When IBM found this out and adjusted their prices it put the squeeze on Be Inc.
@SamuraiCrow the option was the 604e at the time IIRC⌠this was before the G3 was even being used by Apple. The 604e is able to do SMP properly, the 603e lack cache coherency hardware - the 603e uses MEI, where as the 604e has MESI,
Edit: Actually - having just looked out of curiosity, the G3 was not introduced till 97, and the BeBox was long gone by that point. I donât think they lasted much past 96.
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