I’m wondering how this worked out so well for Apple 15 years later (A/UX notwithstanding of course) - perhaps unix was simply not mature enough at that stage
Easy, Linux folks got a laptop/desktop that actually works out of the box, and they weren't really into Linux religion, rather whatever does POSIX would do.
A lesson taken by Microsoft years later, as Project Astoria ashes got repurposed as WSL.
A/UX failed due to management, and politics between IBM and Apple.
It worked out well for NeXT. But it took a long time, NeXTSTEP was released at the end of the 80s. So it took them more than a decade and reverse take-over of Apple, together with the much more affordable Apple hardware.
