Nice strawman. He never said NeXT was irrelevant. He said, "Regardless of their market impact (which in the cases of Lisa and NeXT were disappointing), all four were remarkable artistic achievements." The key words being "market impact". In other words, they didn't sell much, which is true. It was a hindsight observation of market performance, not a forward looking prediction.

Actually, "market impact" does not mean "sales" either. It means more or less "relevance". At that, NeXT failed miserably to influence Unix workstation and personal computer makers.