Direct link to the original Quora answer: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg?srid=i1" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...</a>
The bigger reveal seems to me that Steve then took the Vaio laptop running OS X to Japan (or Hawaii, see below) to meet with Sony. This is well after Apple had killed off their clone business, but it seems they were looking at a possible licensee deal? I can't begin to imagine how different the last 10 years would have been in the tech world if Sony had (finally) licensed Mac OS.<p>(quora comment mentioning Hawaii meeting: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg/comment/989850" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...</a>)
"Star Trek" was another Apple skunkworks project for x86, but Star Trek was running Mac OS on DR DOS in 1992!<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project</a>
I don't believe this story at all, at all... NeXTStep, the precursor to OS X, was running on a 486DX2/66 I had in about 1995.<p>NeXTStep ran on PA-RISC, Intel x86, Motorola 68K and SPARC architectures since well before 2000. Rumors of ports to other platforms such as DEC Alpha, MIPS, etc. were also around, but I have no idea whether or not this ever happened.<p>Supposedly Jobs had a "NRW" the NeXT RISC Workstation, which was a Motorola 88K based system running NeXTSTep, on his desk for quite some time. I have no way of knowing how true this. see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000</a>
Rhapsody ran on x86 and PowerPC in 1998. This story says that by 2000 OS X no longer ran on x86 and required 18 person-months of effort to get it working again. That's a lot of bitrot.
Bogus - NeXTStep already ran on a few CPUs architectures: M68K, PA-RISC, INTEL. It wasn't a stretch for OS X to run on Intel or any other type of CPU Architecture. OS X owes its start to NeXTStep and nothing else.