Just how much Jobs and Next can do for Apple probably cannot be fairly judged for a year or two. Apple's new operating system, based on Next technology, is due in late 1997, but software products are chronically late. For now, Apple seems intent on keeping Jobs focused on helping Apple, and prevailed upon him to appear at its Macworld trade show on Jan. 7. The $200 million he received for Next includes 1.5 million Apple shares, which he cannot sell for at least a year. In the meantime, much of Wall Street and Silicon Valley will be watching closely, and without a trace of nostalgia. ''It's very romantic going back to your first love,'' observes the industry analyst Esther Dyson, ''but it rarely works out.''

just over a year ago, jobs pondered a very different kind of return to Apple. In December 1995, Jobs and his family were vacationing in Hawaii with his close friend Lawrence J. Ellison, the billionaire software entrepreneur who is chairman of the Oracle Corporation. Jobs and Ellison strolled the beach and weighed making a takeover bid for Apple.

At the time, just a few months before Amelio took over as chief executive, Apple was being battered by product problems and management turmoil. The takeover plan, Ellison recently revealed, was nearly complete. A handful of corporate investors, including Oracle, had arranged financing of nearly $3 billion. Their plan called for Jobs to play an executive role. ''We came very, very close to doing it,'' Ellison says. ''Steve is the one who decided against it.''

Jobs now says he balked partly because trying to rehabilitate Apple would have meant so much time away from his family and Pixar, which has become a consuming interest. But mostly, ''I decided I'm not a hostile-takeover kind of guy,'' Jobs says. ''If they had asked me to come back, it might have been different.'' Now that they have asked, he is looking anew at Apple's problems. Not long ago, Jobs agreed with analysts who said that Apple was doomed. ''That's over,'' he said. ''Apple lost.'' Not surprisingly, he has since turned optimistic. ''A lot of people have written Apple off,'' he says now. ''I was discouraged in the past as well. But Apple is still relevant. It has a base of 25 million users. Next to Microsoft, Apple is the only one that still matters.'' Jobs insists that an improved operating system could well enable Apple to challenge Microsoft, much as the Macintosh challenged I.B.M. technology 10 years ago. ''If anything,'' he says, ''I.B.M. was more powerful than Microsoft is today.''

Today, more than 85 percent of all personal computers run on Microsoft Windows; the Mac is next, with 10 percent or less. Still, those millions of users give Apple a base to build from that Next never had. And Next has a devoted following among computer programmers. (Tim Berners-Lee, a British programmer, created the World Wide Web on the Next system.)

Apple couldn't hope for a better pitchman than Jobs, whose genius for infecting others with his enthusiasm is known, by critics and admirers alike, as the ''reality distortion field.'' ''Steve Jobs is passionate about technology, and he can convey that sense of excitement to people who are inherently excitable about technology -- and Silicon Valley is full of them,'' says Richard Shaffer, a principal of Technologic Partners, a research firm. ''If Jobs can help instill in developers a sense that Apple will rise again, then it can rise again.''

It is widely agreed that Jobs still stirs commitment and enthusiasm from his employees, but in a less frenetic style than he did years ago. In the past few years, he has spent most of his time at Pixar, which occupies a nondescript low brick building near the waterfront in Point Richmond.