1986

(January) Apple and NeXT negotiated outside the court rooms. At that time, Apple sued severall companies which used graphical environments similar to MacOS. Therefore Apple was sometimes jokingly named as a "lawyer company with a computer department".

Apple IIGS

Although Apple favoured the Macintosh as their next computer generation, the Apple II series still enjoyed strong sales: It held at one time forty percent of the home computer market and was therefore the only viable rival for the C64 in the USA. The Apple IIGS was the next big revision of the Apple II and the most radical one. The IIGS featured a backward-compatible 16 bit CPU by Western Digital, a 3,5" drive, 16 channel stereo sound and up to 3200 colours. The case design looks similar to the Macintosh while a mouse and a graphical environment (which again resembled the Mac's one) were now standard. The other Apple II models were still being sold while the IIGS keeps the series alive until this very day. Of course there were fears that IIGS's would cannibalize the Macintosh sale numbers - quite justified because the IIGS was in some ways more advanced that the Macintosh computers at that time.