# The return to Apple

## Apple in 1996

To understand how Steve Jobs came back to the company he founded, it is necessary to have a look at Apple’s situation in the mid-1990s.

As we said before, Apple made healthy profits from 1986 to 1995, mainly thanks to its monopoly on both the GUI and the desktop publishing revolution. Everyone who wanted a user-friendly computer bought a Macintosh for approximately $2,000, half of which were pure profits to Cupertino.

But, starting in 1992, Apple felt threatened by an emerging super- power in the computer business: Microsoft. So far Microsoft was mostly known for providing MS-DOS to the IBM PC and its clones,

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