&gt;<i>It wasn&#x27;t really NeXT that they purchased; it was Jobs.</i><p>Easy to say in retrospect. But at the time Jobs was the guy who was once ousted from Apple and hadn&#x27;t done that great of a commercial job with NeXT (besides the technology they created). So there wasn&#x27;t much ground at the time for Jobs to be considered as some kind of &quot;miracle man&quot; that will save Apple.<p>So, while we now can say &quot;they purchased Jobs&quot;, I think it was mostly the allure of a turn-key next-generation OS that the needed sorely at that point that made them go into it and for half a billion.<p>Let&#x27;s not forget that Apple had just killed Copland, and was simultaneously discussing to buy BeOS.<p>&gt;<i>And I&#x27;ll note that the OS wasn&#x27;t that great a deal for Apple; it took them more than 4 years to get a consumer-grade release of it together, far longer than they were predicting at the time.</i><p>Again that&#x27;s in retrospect. At the moment they didn&#x27;t think &quot;we&#x27;re really buying Jobs, who&#x27;ll do miracles and make the company #1 in the world&quot;. They thought: &quot;We need an OS, and this NeXT thing looks like it can be turned into the next OS version soon&quot;.<p>&gt;<i>I&#x27;d again put that down to the power of Jobs&#x27;s reality distortion field, not any kind of market success.</i><p>But they weren&#x27;t looking for market success. After all they didn&#x27;t want to buy an existing userbase but an OS to turn into &quot;OS 9 successor&quot; to give their (Apple&#x27;s) users and attract new ones.<p>So, what they wanted was a good platform for what they do. And given Apple&#x27;s enterprise, dtp and graphics focus in the 90s, NeXT was pretty damn close.