Whenever you read about Steve Jobs, odds are the words “Apple CEO” follow closely behind. The mythic cofounder of one of today’s biggest tech companies is strongly associated with the role, but his tenure as CEO was shorter than many of us realize.
In fact, when Jobs was exiled from Apple in the 1980s and ’90s, he spent almost as much time leading another computer company that has largely been forgotten: NeXT Computer. In his forthcoming book Steve Jobs in Exile, journalist and author Geoffrey Cain tells the story of Jobs’s years at NeXT Computer from 1985 to 1997.
It’s a story worth remembering, with Apple, now 50 years old, in the midst of another CEO transition. John Ternus, previously the senior vice president of hardware, is set to take over the reins from Tim Cook this September. Looking back at Jobs’s NeXT years reveals what he had to learn for Apple to succeed.
Cain spoke with IEEE Spectrum about his book, Jobs’s legacy, and Apple today. Steve Jobs in Exile comes out May 19.
Why did you choose to focus on this period of Jobs’s life?
The story we always hear about Steve Jobs is that he founded Apple version 1.0, and he was brilliant there. And then he was fired, and he went into the wilderness for a short while. He returned and created Apple version 2.0, which was the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, turning Apple into the $4 trillion company that it is today. That’s the popular narrative we hear.
But that’s not an accurate story. That’s the legend, but it’s not what actually happened.
I was a tech writer for a long time, and I had been diving into the history of these major tech figures. In my reporting, I went around the world, and everywhere I went, people were talking about Steve Jobs. It was sort of like, “let’s study the life of Steve Jobs and try to extract school lessons from it.” That’s what a lot of young entrepreneurs and engineers were telling me.
I quickly realized from interviewing former colleagues of Steve Jobs that only half the story was being told, and it glossed over these entire middle 12 years in the legacy of Steve Jobs. He died when he was [56] years old. That’s a third of his adult life, and he spent it at this company called NeXT Computer.
[NeXT] was the source of major advancements in software, especially, but also in hardware, and it had been completely forgotten by history. Not only was this a significant company historically, but today it’s the foundation for all theoperating systems that Apple has developed since then. When you look at an Apple device today, in a way you’re looking at NeXT Computer.
NeXT and Apple were both startups that were spearheaded by Jobs. Why were their fates so different?
Their fates were different, but their fates merged. So why were their fates different? Well, Apple version one was a failure in many ways, and we tend to forget that the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success. And so Apple version one, not a success, and NeXT Computer, not a success at first. The reason is, in part, because Steve Jobs was not ready.
Today we mythologize him as the great visionary of our era, the king of entrepreneurs. But he was immature, egotistical, and brash. He made a lot of decisions at both Apple and NeXT that damaged the company and the careers of people who were working for him.
Yes, Steve Jobs was always talented. He was a visionary, but he had to learn the craft of discipline. He had to learn to apply his talents to the limits of the markets, what people were willing to buy.
But to go back to your question, why did NeXT fail? Steve Jobs was making bad decisions, and the hardware division shut down. They laid off more than half of the company’s employees. Why did Apple succeed? In the end, it’s because Steve Jobs was more circumspect and mature by the time he returned. He was able to bring these people together and build the Apple Renaissance, starting with the iPod, or maybe the iMac if you want to go back further. With those products in the late ’90s and early 2000s, that’s where he made his mark, and that’s why we remember him today.
Jobs’s Vision: Perfect Integration of Hardware and Software
You make the point in the book that software engineers were Jobs’s “favored inner circle.” But Apple is well known for building hardware and software together. How did his priorities affect the company’s trajectory?
Steve Jobs’s vision for Apple was always the perfect integration of hardware and software. From the beginning, he saw the value in controlling the whole experience, end-to-end, for the user. But the question that not many people have asked is: How did he actually build that? A lot of startup founders want to create a seamless ecosystem, but you can only achieve that vision if you have a lot of scale and leverage over the market. That’s what he had to learn during his NeXT Computer years.
His customers for NeXT Computer were universities, laboratories, intelligence agencies, people who were buying high-end computers that could do the most advanced data analysis and software applications of the time. It took him a long time to realize that his customers actually wanted the software, which was built on a real revolution at the time called “object oriented programming.”
Computers in the 1980s were really difficult to program. He discovered at NeXT Computer that he could build beautiful software using what are called “objects”—items that, essentially, are pre-programmed in a library. This is how apps are made today, and Steve Jobs was doing this in 1988. As a result, the first ever app store appeared on a NeXT computer.
Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary is out May 19. Portfolio/Penguin Random House
This is fairly common usage today, but at the time it was comparable to the transformation happening now, from the app stores of the past era to AI agents and generative AI. He was on the cusp of a transformation, and he had to realize that that transformation was what mattered.
Software was his priority, and it became an even greater priority over time. But there’s a lesson here, specifically for engineers and scientists, that sometimes it’s not clear what the significance is of something you’re working on right now. Often there are elements within a project that are actually the real gold mine, and we just don’t see it yet.
That’s what makes me really interested in the big transformations now happening with AI. I often wonder, if Steve Jobs were still alive, what he would be doing now. The moment that we live in now would really be a Steve Jobs moment.
Jobs also purchased Pixar during this period. How does that compare to his experience with NeXT?
The story of Pixar is different from NeXT. Pixar was struggling. It used to make something called the image computer, and it cost more than [US] $100,000. They were using it in sci-fi movies back in the ’80s, but Hollywood studios weren’t really adopting it. And in the end, some of its main customers were the CIA and the National [Security] Agency.
Similar to NeXT computer, Steve bet wrong on hardware once again at the beginning. And so he had to close the hardware division at Pixar, and he focused on making software called RenderMan. RenderMan was their main product, and it was used to make Toy Story and the other great films of Pixar.
The difference from NeXT, though, is that Pixar did become a success, even though the hardware division closed. [Pixar cofounder] Ed Catmull and [founding employee, later chief creative officer] John Lasseter told Steve, when he bought it from George Lucas, that he had to stay out of creative meetings. That was the deal, and Steve respected it. They were able to make Toy Story, and it was just a [huge] success. It was the IPO that made Steve Jobs a billionaire.
Pixar was the company that he became more focused on in the later years of this wilderness. He focused on the dealmaking, the relationship with Disney—the side of being a business executive. That’s where he excelled, and that’s where he was able to make Pixar shine.
What Does New Apple CEO Ternus Need to Do?
John Ternus will be taking over as Apple CEO in September. What was your reaction to the announcement?
There are people out there who are saying that John Ternus needs to invent the new iPhone. I understand where they’re coming from, but I just don’t agree with the conclusions.
You have to remember that the masterpiece age of Apple was only about seven years. It lasted from 2001 to 2008 when they released their main products. The historical conditions and the leadership team that were able to create those massive successes just doesn’t exist anymore.
Apple has matured into a $4 trillion corporation. Tim Cook was a supply chain expert and built it into the giant it is. And really, what John Ternus has to do now is maintain the success. He’s not here to build the one blowout product. Apple is a company that’s become so successful that their products are integrated into everyday life. So that’s a success that John Ternus is, I think, being appointed to maintain, and it’s not by any means a Steve Jobs story.
What do you think it will mean for Apple to be run by someone who’s coming from the hardware engineering side of things?
Apple has admitted that it’s behind on AI. They signed a big partnership with Google, and now they’re reworking the entire foundation of Siri to be on top of Google AI, which is a big shift in software, because Apple’s always been tightly controlling things in-house.
Geoffrey Cain is a bestselling author of books on technology and business, including Samsung Rising and The Perfect Police State. Beowulf Sheehan
So I actually see their future more like a hardware company. I think they’re still going to make great [software]. It’s just not going to be the cutting-edge anymore. That ground is moving over towards OpenAI and Google and software-oriented companies. Apple’s strength is absolutely hardware, and they’re going to continue to focus on that, because that’s what they do best.
In the next few years, AI is going to very quickly get integrated into everyday life. I think that, especially at Apple, they’re going to release AI, but it’s not going to be in your face. It’s more like the AI is running in the background, and it’s doing what it needs to do. If Apple can master that, I think that’s going to help them a lot. If they can release another iPhone that’s really well built for AI, but you don’t see the AI, people are going to buy Apple.
Anything else you’d like to say about Apple or your book?
The history that I was writing about was the transition from hardware to software that happened in the 1990s, and I think the story is very relevant, in a way. We’re now entering the next big transition, and we’re entering a wilderness ourselves. And so this is the kind of story that we can go back to, and we can see what Steve Jobs and his people were doing at the time to try to understand the times that we live in now.