It wasn&#x27;t really NeXT that they purchased; it was Jobs.<p>Sure, they got an OS, and they got some good people. But it was basically an acquihire. NeXT had approximately no commercial success. If Apple had only wanted a next-generation OS to compensate for their failure to develop one internally, they could have bought Be, and for a much lower price. There were no other suitors to acquire NeXT; without Apple&#x27;s acquisition, they surely would have died out within a couple of years, just like Be did.<p>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&#x27;d again put that down to the power of Jobs&#x27;s reality distortion field, not any kind of market success.