The NeXTstation dropped the cube's magneto-optical drive for a conventional SCSI hard diskMagnetic storage with spinning platters — the primary bulk storage for PCs and servers for decades. and color display — putting NeXTSTEP in more university labs and startups. Developers still used Objective-CA language combining C with Smalltalk-style object messaging — used for macOS and iOS before Swift. and Interface Builder; Tim Berners-Lee's WWWWorld Wide Web — the linked hypertext system accessed over the internet. work continued on NeXT hardware. Apple later acquired NeXT and ported NeXTSTEP to become macOSApple's desktop operating system — runs on Mac hardware with Unix foundations and the Cocoa UI framework..

The NeXTstation made NeXTSTEP workstations accessible beyond the original cube's price point.

It spread the development environment that became the foundation of modern macOSApple's desktop operating system — runs on Mac hardware with Unix foundations and the Cocoa UI framework. and iOSApple's mobile operating system — runs iPhone and iPad with a sandboxed app ecosystem. tooling.