After all, remember what Bill gates with his company Microsoft put him through? They stole windows from him, became a powerhouse company and almost ran him to the ground and Apple computers along with it.
Another victim of Apple marketing nonsense...
Apple computers was maintained by the Apple II line, not the Macintosh line, for pretty much the Apple IIs entire run. The Apple II competed with Commodore Business Machines to provide businesses, basically, with the ability to run VisiCalc, and later programs, and thus generate limited reports without bothering the big machine database guys. The original Mac OS was literally stolen from Xerox Alto via Steve Jobs bribing Xerox with Apple stock to gain access to their facility and ordering copies of their OS for his entire development team for a hardcore Reverse Engineering effort. Apple's grand-theft-OS was a dysfunctional piece of junk out of the door, just like OS X was that they would get under control later.
Apple's direct competitors, aka 68k home computer systems, Commodore-Amiga released their own platform with GUI OSes and a full software suite around the same time
https://www.youtube.com/embed/V-SJQdREDKM?feature=oembed in 1985 and thus it was useful for more then a conversational piece. Amiga was actually a revolutionary piece of kit, unlike the Macintosh and tended to be considered better with no indication that they didn't develop their OSes entirely in house, unlike Apple. The problem with Commodore-Amiga and Atari is that the now former Commodore CEO took the reigns of Atari, and basically was determined to drive his former company into the ground destroying all of the old names but Apple in the process. Apple survived due to it's traditional lack of interest in being price competitive and protective contracts with schools, and can only claim to have ever competed with Microsoft based on everyone else having eventually left the field.
A few years earlier Microsoft, the owners of BASIC, joined with IBM to help provide support with their intent to move into the PC market. People that were sceptical of the numerous home computer companies saw IBM as being more dependable for them to invest with. IBM took it one step further and did the unprecedented thing of literally opening the hardware and giving the specs in the manual with their initial line up, while all of their competitors were purely proprietary systems. This in turn led to viral PC market we have today.
Bill Gates ended up suggesting QDOS to IBM after CP/M turned them down, but his company would not be involved in OS development until IBM decided to make HDD instead of floppy based OS. The media had a circus day claiming QDOS was pirated off CP/M, and there were pirated versions of CP/M, but QDOS was not one of them. As Microsoft broke away from IBM things moved to Microsoft verse IBM's OS/2 around 1987. Microsoft decided around this point to license from Apple for Windows 1.0, which was basically a two column file explorer people familiar with running DOS have seen in one flavor or another. When Microsoft hit Windows 3.0 in 1990 they moved to a basic 1980s style GUI, and Apple as always decided patent trolling is better then trying to compete, so launched this utterly dunderheaded lawsuit over having a similar "look & feel", aka icons and windows you can put icons in, just like they're now doing to Samsung, which got thrown out on its ear. At no time was there any claim of code being stolen and that wouldn't even make that much sense as Apple was running Motorola 68k processors in their Macintosh line from day 1 to that point while Windows was for x86 and built around MSDOS. Note the 80486 came out in 1989 and combined with other improvements driven by the IBM's decision to go with open hardware everyone else had already started to fall behind purely based on hardware and DOS being very lightweight. Of course the classic Microsoft rule of initial products being less then wonderful applied and Windows 3.1 didn't show up until 1992. Incidentally Linus Torvald's released the initial Linux kernel in 1991, and the X Server is actually rather old.
Then 1995 rolled around and as far as I can tell Microsoft has sole credit for the then novel concept of having a task bar you could minimize applications to and maximize applications from instead of dragging windows and other more limited approaches.
Apple, unlike Microsoft, has never been good at competing in the purist terms, but they have always been very good at marketing and being able to sell computers to the computer illiterate while spinning it so they can pretend they're elite, much to the annoyance of everyone else that has to suffer said people. The reality is that while Apple might be at war with Microsoft, Microsoft has never been at war with Apple. To take advantage of its strengths Apple has needed to jump around with products, although none of them could be called innovative rather then market deformation due to a company with some clout and the willingness to bully forcing their way in while playing their classic marketing games because they can only keep that marketing magic viable so long.
Apple is one of the biggest Intellectual Property criminals in the industry, being well known for buying out companies for gimmicks they can lock down IP on and frivolous patent trolling and hence in many respects represents one of the biggest _obstacles_ to actual innovation in the industry.
Steve Jobs was not a good man, but he did get things done. Given he was dealing with cancer I hope he didn't suffer that much, but I can't honestly say I have much respect for the man or his company.
