As Apple heads toward next month’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), cast your mind back almost 30 years. That’s when something happened that arguably put events in motion that led to Apple becoming the company it is today. That was when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs returned to the top job at WWDC 1997 — the first such event after Apple acquired NeXT.
It took until 2000 to fully realize what the NeXT purchase meant; that’s when the Mac OS X Public Beta was released. The operating system has seen many twists and turns since then, but the NeXTStep OS acquisition forms the basis on which the Apple software ecosystem has been built. Mac, iPhone, iPad – even Apple Watch and Vision Pro – all share elements of it.
You can see its traces each time you use an application that makes use of a macOS API that uses the NS — ‘NeXTStep’ prefix. That means you’re using NeXT when you work in SwiftUI, use Apple’s core frameworks, or write code for use across different platforms in the current ecosystem. Despite the many names for Apple’s platforms, they all have a little NeXT in common.
The need for a new, modern operating system was critical at the time to Apple. The company had fallen into the doldrums with its classic Mac OS operating system and competitors had forged ahead, at least in marketshare. Among others, Michael Dell, Time Magazine, and almost everyone else expected the company to collapse. NeXT was the salvation, Jobs the icon, and history the prize.
