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.

The big debt to NS

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.

The next challenge now

Today’s Apple faces a fresh existential challenge, and while much of it feels media-driven, the company does need to introduce an intelligence layer around and upon its platforms, alongside the tools developers need to exploit AI within their applications. 

Apple knows this, too, which is why it already offers Apple Intelligence APIs to developers to use in their apps. The company also knows they need a way to market those software ideas and get them into the hands of end users; that’s what the App Store provides.

When Apple wove NeXT into its operating system, it somehow managed to provide developers with better tools, modern, enduring foundations, frameworks and everything else needed to build an ecosystem that extends across multiple product families at a range of prices and technological advancement — from the $499 MacBook Neo to the $3,499 Vision Pro. You can build applications for any or all of these platforms using components Apple provides, along with what you bring yourself. To a great extent, all of this potential was unlocked by the acquisition of NeXTStep and its use in OS X at the turn of the century. 

Telling stories

No doubt, developers are eager to discover the extent to which Apple has managed to join the circle of AI development on its platforms. They surely hope for powerful new APIs to enhance their products with a new intelligence layer, even while Apple itself needs to offer developers the same thing to keep them loyal to its platforms. 

If you squint just a little bit, the same challenges that haunted Apple in the late ‘90s echo again today. Apple wants to reinvent itself for AI without sacrificing all the benefits of its existing ecosystem. It wants to do so while making sure its developer community buys into its chosen direction. To help achieve this, it can lean heavily into its inherent hardware advantage: Not only can its products run the apps developers build, but they are also fantastic platforms to build on in the first place. All the same, it needs to convince them with a narrative that resonates, which means that while WWDC in 1997 was all about NeXTStep, WWDC 2026 is all about which steps Apple takes next. 

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