Apple acquired Steve Jobs’s company NeXT in 1996.
Apple announced the acquisition of NeXT in December 1996 for about $429 million, plus shares of Apple stock. The deal brought Jobs back to Apple, which he had left in 1985 after a power struggle with the company’s board and chief executive, John Sculley.
NeXT’s operating system and development technologies became the foundation for Apple’s next-generation software strategy. The NeXTSTEP technology was adapted into Mac OS X, later known as OS X and then macOS. The acquisition also returned Jobs to an executive role at Apple; he became interim chief executive in 1997.
The acquisition year is sometimes confused with Jobs’s return as Apple’s leader. Apple bought NeXT in 1996, while Jobs took the interim CEO role the following year. The transaction was important because it reunited Apple with both its co-founder and a modern software platform.