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Fifty years ago, three men signed a piece of paper in a California garage and called their new venture Apple Computer Company. One of them, Ronald Wayne, sold his 10 percent stake back within two weeks for $800. The other two, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, went on to build what is today one of the most valuable companies in history. Apple Computer Company was incorporated on April 1, 1976. The circuit board at the heart of its first product, the Apple I, had been designed by Wozniak in the months before the company was formally founded.Fifty years on, Apple is worth more than $3.6 trillion, a figure that would have been unimaginable to anyone watching the company nearly collapse in 1997, according to Counterpoint Research.The scale alone would make for a good story. But Apple's 50th is not really a story about scale. It is a story about how close it all came to ending.To make sense of how Apple nearly died, one needs to start in 1983, with what remains one of the more audacious recruiting pitches in business history. Jobs wanted John Sculley , then running Pepsi-Cola, to come and run Apple instead.His closing argument: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" Sculley left Pepsi. Within two years, he and Jobs were barely speaking.By 1985, Mac sales had stalled.According to Walter Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs, Jobs was clashing with Sculley over where the company was headed, and his management style, brilliant and bruising in roughly equal measure, had alienated enough people inside Apple that when he attempted to organise a boardroom move against Sculley, almost nobody backed himSculley found out, called a meeting, and the board sided with him without much deliberation. Jobs was stripped of his operational role. He resigned in September 1985, took a few Apple engineers with him, and went off to start a new company called NeXT. He was 30 years old.What followed for Jobs was twelve years that Isaacson, in his biography, describes as his wilderness period, though that undersells what actually happened during them. At NeXT, he built NeXTSTEP, a Unix-based operating system that earned genuine admiration from the engineers and academics who used it, even if the hardware it ran on never broke through commercially.In 1986, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm for $10 million, renamed it Pixar, and turned it into something nobody had seen before. When Toy Story came out in 1995, the world's first fully computer-animated feature, Jobs took Pixar public. The IPO made him a billionaire.Apple, in the meantime, was unravelling. As Fortune documented in its detailed account of Jobs's return, the company went through three CEOs after his departure and none of them could find the thread. Sculley gave way to Michael Spindler in 1993. Spindler gave way to Gil Amelio in 1996.The Mac operating system, essentially unchanged in its underlying architecture since 1984, kept failing to modernise despite project after expensive project. The product catalogue had grown into an incomprehensible sprawl of overlapping models. Even loyal customers couldn't tell you which Mac they were supposed to buy or why.Market share, which had been close to 20 percent in the late 1980s, had fallen to under five percent by 1997. According to Fortune, losses exceeded $1 billion across the 18 months leading up to Jobs's return.By late 1996, Apple had roughly 90 days of cash left to operate.BusinessWeek ran Apple's logo on its February 1996 cover beside the words "The Fall of an American Icon." Wired went further: its 1997 cover showed the Apple logo tangled in barbed wire, with one word printed below it. "PRAY."The recovery did not begin with a product. It began with an acquisition.Apple's board needed a modern operating system. It had looked at BeOS, built by former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée, but those talks broke down over price.The board turned instead to NeXT and the operating system Jobs had spent over a decade building. The deal was announced in December 1996 and finalised on February 9, 1997, at a cost of $400 million. Jobs returned to Cupertino as an informal adviser.Amelio, still CEO at the time, believed Jobs could be contained in a creative advisory role while he continued running the company. That assumption did not last long. Within months, Jobs had placed trusted NeXT executives in key roles and built enough board support to make Amelio's position untenable.Amelio resigned on July 9, 1997, after exactly 500 days as CEO, as reported by AppleInsider. Jobs was named interim CEO in September that year, twelve years after the same board had removed him.As Fortune later wrote, 1997 was a year of triage for Apple: a humbling deal with Microsoft, a product line cut to the bone, and a leader working with the urgency of someone who understood exactly what losing looked like. Fortune noted that Jobs had changed during his years away. He was still the aesthete who demanded beautiful objects, but now he was one who also demanded those objects turn a profit.The Microsoft deal came first. At Macworld Boston in August 1997, Jobs announced in front of a crowd that audibly booed that Microsoft would put $150 million into Apple and keep developing Office for Mac for five more years.As Bloomberg reported from the event, Jobs told the audience: "We are shepherding some of the great assets in the computer industry. If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things." Whatever the crowd felt about it, the money bought Apple the time it needed.The product line came next. Jobs cut it from dozens of models to four. He killed the Mac clone licensing programme that had been eating into Apple's own margins. On November 10, 1997, Apple opened an online store and moved to a build-to-order model, cutting out the distribution layers that had long separated the company from its customers.Then came the advertising. On September 28, 1997, "Think Different" aired for the first time during ABC's broadcast of Toy Story, a 60-second film featuring black-and-white portraits of Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, and others, narrated by Richard Dreyfuss.The campaign cost a reported $90 million and was made by TBWA\Chiat\Day. It won the Emmy for Best Commercial in 1998 and the Grand Effie Award in 2000. More than any product announcement, it did the thing Apple most needed to do: it made people believe the company was still worth believing in.The iMac came in May 1998, designed by Jony Ive, with a translucent curved shell in bondi blue that looked like nothing on the market. It sold 800,000 units in its first five months. Apple closed 1998 with a profit of $309 million, against a loss of over $1 billion the previous year.Fortune later noted that $1,000 put into Apple stock the day Jobs took over as interim CEO was worth roughly $36,000 by 2008. The compounding had barely begun.The company that confronts its second half-century is a very different animal from the one Jobs came back to save, but the pressures on it are just as real.What has not changed is the foundation. The installed base remains enormous and loyal. The hardware-software integration remains tighter than anything a competitor offers.The services layer spanning the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud, and Apple TV+ keeps generating high-margin revenue that insulates the company from the choppiness of hardware cycles.Fifty years in, the most profitable near-death story in corporate history is still being written.