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"When Apple was in the ropes"

Can you explain when you think this was?

Probably when they were on the verge of bankruptcy in 1996/97.

That may be what they're referring to, but Apple wasn't using Objective-C at that point, NeXT was.

In 1996/1997, the Macintosh was still, for most end-users, the only viable alternative to an IBM PC derivative, and one with market share.

The old Mac OS didn't use Objective-C-based frameworks. Objective C was used on the NeXT workstations.

Objective C became popular because it was part of the tech stack brought back into Apple by Jobs.