His frustration with Apple was evident when he gave a talk to a Stanford Business School club at the home of a student, who asked him to sign a Macintosh keyboard. Jobs agreed to do so if he could remove the keys that had been added to the Mac after he left. He pulled out his car keys and pried off the four arrow cursor keys, which he had once banned, as well as the top row of F1, F2, F3 . . . function keys. “I’m changing the world one keyboard at a time,” he deadpanned. Then he signed the mutilated keyboard.

　　 乔布斯对苹果的沮丧是显而易见的。有一次，他在一个学生家里给斯坦福商学院俱乐部成员演讲，那个学生请他在一个麦金塔的键盘上签名。乔布斯说，如果能把他离开苹果后加到Mac上的键都拿掉，就可以签名。他拿出汽车钥匙，抠掉了他曾经禁止使用的四个箭头光标按键，还有最上面一行的“F1、F2、F3……”等功能键。“我在一次一个键盘地改变世界。”他面无表情地说。然后他在残缺不全的键盘上签了名。

　　During his 1995 Christmas vacation in Kona Village, Hawaii, Jobs went walking along the beach with his friend Larry Ellison, the irrepressible Oracle chairman. They discussed making a takeover bid for Apple and restoring Jobs as its head. Ellison said he could line up $3 billion in financing: “I will buy Apple, you will get 25% of it right away for being CEO, and we can restore it to its past glory.” But Jobs demurred. “I decided I’m not a hostile-takeover kind of guy,” he explained. “If they had asked me to come back, it might have been different.”

　　 1995年圣诞节，在夏威夷的康娜度假村休假时，乔布斯跟他的朋友甲骨文强势的董事长拉里·埃利森在海滩散步。他们讨论收购苹果，然后让乔布斯回去重掌大局。埃利森说他可以安排30亿美元的融资。“我会买下苹果，你作为CEO会立即获得25%的股份，我们可以重现它过去的辉煌。”但是乔布斯却表示反对。“我认定我不是那种能做恶意收购的人，”他解释说，“如果他们请我回去，那就不一样了。”

　　By 1996 Apple’s share of the market had fallen to 4% from a high of 16% in the late 1980s. Michael Spindler, the German-born chief of Apple’s European operations who had replaced Sculley as CEO in 1993, tried to sell the company to Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. That failed, and he was ousted in February 1996 and replaced by Gil Amelio, a research engineer who was CEO of National Semiconductor. During his first year the company lost $1 billion, and the stock price, which had been $70 in 1991, fell to $14, even as the tech bubble was pushing other stocks into the stratosphere.

　　 到1996年，苹果的市场份额已经从80年代末的高达16%下降到4%。1993年取代斯卡利担任苹果CEO的迈克尔·斯平德勒（MichaelSpixidler），试图把公司卖给太阳微系统、IBM和惠普。失败后，斯平德勒在1996年2月被吉尔·阿梅里奥（GilAmelio）取代。吉尔是一位研发工程师，曾任国家半导体公司的CEO。在他任期的第一年，苹果公司亏损了10亿美元，股票价格从1991年时的70美元暴跌到14美元，而当时，高科技泡沫正把其他股票的价格推向史无前例的高点。