Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell said that Steve Jobs wanted to offer Dell to license Apple software, namely macOS. Dell liked the offer, but he and Jobs could not agree on the details.
It was more profitable for Dell to pay royalties to Apple for every macOS PC sold. Jobs didn't like that arrangement because it would have reduced Apple's own direct sales. Jobs tried to justify his idea of having Dell install his operating system on its computers as an alternative to Windows, including supplying a system unit or laptop to the user with two operating systems to choose from (Windows and macOS). In that case, Dell would pay Apple for each PC sold without regard to the user's choice.
The deal didn't go through at the time. Dell decided that Jobs' offer didn't look attractive because macOS wasn't particularly popular at the time. Dell feared that Apple's license fee wouldn't generate any revenue. The company was confident that users would simply choose Windows PC options. Also, Jobs couldn't guarantee tech support for Dell's macOS computers in a few years, which could have been a problem for users.
Notably, Jobs approached Dell in 1993 with a similar proposal, but then he tried to sell a license for the NeXTSTEP operating system on PCs with Intel processors. Dell did not accept Jobs' arguments and turned down the deal
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