A purchase that was really a homecoming
On 20 December 1996, Apple announced that it would acquire NeXT, the company Steve Jobs had founded after leaving Apple in 1985.1 The stated reason was technical. Apple needed a modern operating system, and NeXT had one.1 The deeper consequence was that the founder came back with it. Within months Jobs had moved from adviser to the centre of power, and by September 1997 he was interim chief executive, a title he kept until 2000, when he dropped the "interim" and quipped that he would use the title "iCEO."1, 2 A software deal had become the return of the man who defined the brand.
Apple in 1996 was close to collapse. It was losing money, its product line had sprawled into confusion, and commentators openly discussed whether the company would survive the decade.3 The brand that the Macintosh had made distinctive in 1984 had blurred into a catalogue of overlapping machines with names few could tell apart.3 The turnaround that followed is one of the clearest examples in business history of brand recovery through subtraction.
Focus as a branding tool
Jobs's first major act was to cut. He reduced a confusing range of products to a simple grid of four: a desktop and a portable, each in a consumer and a professional version.4 He ended the licensing programme that had allowed other manufacturers to make Macintosh clones, arguing that it drained the brand of its value without building the company.3, 4 He cancelled projects, including the Newton handheld, that diluted attention.2 Each decision was framed not as cost cutting but as clarity.
This was branding through discipline. By narrowing what Apple made, Jobs narrowed what Apple meant. A customer could once again say what the company stood for, because the company itself had decided. The lesson that focus is a form of positioning runs through everything Apple did afterward, and it began in these first months of the return.
The truce with Microsoft
In August 1997, at the Macworld Expo in Boston, Jobs announced that Microsoft would invest 150 million dollars in Apple and continue to develop its software for the Mac.3, 5 The audience booed the image of Bill Gates on the screen, but the deal was a shrewd branding move.6 It removed the immediate threat of Apple being seen as a dying platform, and it let the company stop fighting a war it could not win so that it could rebuild its own identity. A rival's endorsement, however uncomfortable, bought Apple time to become itself again.
The moment showed a mature understanding of what the brand needed. Apple did not need to defeat Microsoft. It needed to survive, refocus, and remind the world what made it different. Accepting help from the enemy was less important than the story Jobs wanted to tell next.
Think different
That story arrived in the "Think different" campaign, launched in 1997 and explored in our verse on the Think different campaign of that year.7 The core of the advertising, the television commercial and the portrait series, did not show a single product. It showed figures such as Einstein, Gandhi, and Picasso, and it aligned Apple with creativity and nonconformity rather than specifications.7 Coming at the moment of the founder's return, the campaign was as much a statement of intent as an advertisement. It told the market that Apple remembered who it was.
The genius of the timing was that the campaign restored the brand's meaning before the products could. Apple could not yet ship the machines that would prove the promise. What it could do was reclaim its position as the humane, creative alternative, the identity the Macintosh had first established. The advertising held the brand together while the company rebuilt the substance behind it.
The foundation for everything that followed
The return of Steve Jobs set the stage for the iMac in 1998, the iPod in 2001, and the iPhone in 2007, but its most important work was done in the first year.2 Jobs took a brand that had lost its meaning and gave it back a single, confident idea. He proved that recovery is often a matter of removing rather than adding, and that a clear position is worth more than a full catalogue. For a branding journal, 1997 is the year Apple stopped being a struggling computer maker and became, once again, the company that thought different.
Written with AI assistance, edited by a human. Find out more about our Use of AI.
1. Wikipedia, "NeXT", read 2 October 2026, for NeXT having been founded in 1985 by Steve Jobs after he was ousted from Apple earlier that year, for Apple Computer announcing its intention to acquire NeXT on 20 December 1996, for the main purpose of the acquisition, to use NeXTSTEP as a foundation to replace the dated classic Mac OS, and for Jobs returning to Apple as a consultant and being formally named interim chief executive on 16 September 1997, after Gil Amelio's ouster in July 1997. The article puts the price at 427 million dollars in cash, shares, stock options and debt and dates the completion of the deal to 7 February 1997; the body gives neither. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT
2. Wikipedia, "Steve Jobs", read 2 October 2026, for Jobs becoming de facto chief after Gil Amelio was ousted in July 1997 and being formally named interim chief executive on 16 September 1997; for the "iCEO" title, which the article records as a quip Jobs made at the 2000 Macworld Expo, when he dropped the "interim" modifier and became permanent chief executive; for Jobs terminating several projects in March 1998, among them Newton, Cyberdog and OpenDoc, to concentrate Apple's efforts on returning to profitability; and for the iMac of 1998, the iPod of 23 October 2001 and the iPhone, released on 29 June 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
3. Wikipedia, "History of Apple Inc.", read 2 October 2026, for Apple's crisis in the mid-1990s, with CFO Jim Graziano asking the board in 1995 to find a buyer because the company was no longer financially viable and Fortune writing in February 1996 that "the company that invented the personal computer will likely disappear"; for a product line of too many models, where "the profusion of arbitrary model numbers confused consumers and hurt Apple's reputation for simplicity"; for the Macintosh going on sale on 24 January 1984; for the licensing of the Mac OS to third-party manufacturers begun in 1995, the clones having reduced Apple's own sales, and Jobs finding a loophole to terminate the programme; and for the partnership with Microsoft announced at the 1997 Macworld Expo, with a five-year commitment to release Microsoft Office for Macintosh and a 150 million dollar investment in Apple. The article gives no figure for Apple's losses in 1996. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.
4. Macworld, Benj Edwards, "Steve Jobs's seven key decisions", 18 September 2012, added during the retrofit, off whitelist and used for corroboration only, for the "simple four-square grid" Jobs defined for the Macintosh, two squares for consumer desktops and portables and two for pro desktops and portables, and for his conviction, in the article's words, that "Clones watered down the Macintosh brand", with Apple declining in 1997 to license Mac OS 8 to the clone makers. https://www.macworld.com/article/219225/steve-jobss-seven-key-decisions.html
5. Microsoft, "Microsoft and Apple Affirm Commitment To Build Next Generation Software for Macintosh", press release, Boston, 6 August 1997, for the agreement announced in a keynote address at MacWorld Boston on 6 August 1997, for Microsoft's investment of 150 million dollars in non-voting Apple stock, and for its commitment to develop and ship future versions of Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and other Microsoft tools for the Mac platform. This note replaces the bare Apple Newsroom homepage listed in the sources, which carries no release from 1997. https://news.microsoft.com/source/1997/08/06/microsoft-and-apple-affirm-commitment-to-build-next-generation-software-for-macintosh/
6. The Seattle Times, Michele Matassa Flores and Thomas W. Haines, "Microsoft, Apple Join Forces -- Disbelief, Boos Greet Today's Stunning Announcement At Macworld Expo", 6 August 1997, added during the retrofit, off whitelist and used for corroboration only, for Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates appearing on an overhead screen at the MacWorld convention in Boston, and for Jobs's announcement prompting "gasps of disbelief and loud boos from the audience". The article ties the boos to the announcement as a whole rather than to the image of Gates alone. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19970806/2553374/microsoft-apple-join-forces----disbelief-boos-greet-todays-stunning-announcement-at-macworld-expo
7. Wikipedia, "Think different", read 2 October 2026, for the slogan as an Apple campaign used from 1997 to 2002 and created by the Los Angeles office of TBWA\Chiat\Day; for the one-minute commercial built from black-and-white footage of 17 iconic 20th-century personalities, among them Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Pablo Picasso, and the print series of single historic figures with "no reference to the company's products"; and for the campaign, together with the return of Steve Jobs, having reestablished the "counter-culture" aura of Apple's earlier days. The article also records a second strand of print ads that prominently featured Apple's computers, which is why the body limits the claim to the commercial and the portrait series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different
