Why did Steve Jobs choose the Motorola 68030@25 MHz for the first NeXT Computer in 1988 and not an Intel 80386DX@25 MHz processor?

Question

Was the reason because he knew the 68K from the Macintosh, or were there other reasons that spoke in favor of the 68030 and the additional 68882 floating-point coprocessor? The i386, along with a 387 co-processor, would have had all the functions that were necessary for a then-modern operating system like NextStep. Thanks to its VM86 mode, the 386 CPU would also have allowed DOS programs to be run natively inside the VM86. That's why I'm wondering why the 386 wasn't chosen. ​ I don't know whether an i386 was cheaper than the 68030.

• The Intel 80386 with 25 MHz was introduced in April 4, 1988 and had a performance of about 7.5 MIPS. 80386 with lower clock rates where available since 1985.
• The Motorola 68030 with 25 MHz was introduced in around 1987 and had a performance of about 5 MIPS.

Answer 1

Very likely, familiarity with the Motorola environment and Motorola as a supplier within the development staff might have been technical reasons for choosing that CPU. After all, quite some of the designers had an Apple background, just like Jobs himself. But I don't think basing NeXT on Intel would have presented a major technical problem for any of their developers above maybe minor inconveniences (Keep in mind NeXTSTEP for Intel became available 1993).

Beyond technical reasoning, I would assume marketing reasons were considered much more important.

Looking at the first NeXT presentations, you can easily see that the Next ecosystem had the intent to appear as something revolutionary, new and ground-breaking, throwing all of the "old and awkward stuff" out of the window. The NeXTSTEP environment was demonstrated (quite credibly, at the time) as a revolutionary object-oriented and entirely user-friendly (and, admittedly, "exotic" and "luxury" - to justify the price point) combination of hardware and software.

Considering these ambitions, the added capability to be able to execute "boring old DOS programs" like WordPerfect or Multiplan would rather have de-valued the platform than been seen as added value, and, more importantly, would probably have encouraged reviewers to directly compare NeXTStations to high-end PCs, both price- and performance-wise, this totally defeating the ground-breaking targets (and, obviously, also eroding their $$-value). After all, DOS programs would in no way have profited from NeXTSTEP. Next wanted to be clearly distinct from the PC market, not integrate with it. So, the ecosystem targeted not at competing with high-end PCs, but rather at markets above.

I think it must be noted that this actually seemed possible at the time NeXT was active. The high-end DOS/PC platform was by far not as prevalent and "standard" as it was in later years, thus that marketing policy was probably even reasonable (and resonated quite well in the higher-education and academic research market, for example, and, as such, worked at least for some years).

Answer 2

As far as I can tell almost nobody except the PC makers used x86. 68k was the more common architecture by far being in the Sharp 68k, Amiga, Macintosh, Megadrive, Sun-1, Vaxstation 100, and SGI Iris. 68k was actually a very popular chip for workstations and that's what Next was making.

Making a workstation from the 386 would actually have been pretty strange.

Answer 3

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT several people came with Jobs from Apple, including at least one hardware designer which presumably knew the 68000 family very well already.

My guess would be that it would be much faster to get a finished product out by continuing what they already had been doing and knew worked, as opposed to having to switch architecture to something unknown to them.