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★★★★★ Steve Jobs in Exile among other classic Apple books.
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain serves up a comprehensive history of that other computer company Steve Jobs founded, NeXT.

The book, released Tuesday, starts in 1985 with Steve Jobs being forced out of Apple. It tells the tumultuous tale of what happens after Jobs poaches five Apple employees, they all gather in his bare living room, and ask, “Well … now what?” 

Starting fresh at just the right moment in history, they invented the computer architecture of the modern era with a powerful UNIX foundation, object-oriented programming and emerging web technologies. It’s an intensely frustrating tale of Jobs blowing chances at success left and right, letting perfection be the enemy of the good. 

Pair this book with Apple: The First 50 Years and you have the complete picture. It’s a shorter read that covers fascinating years where Steve grew up as a leader. 

With Apple’s 50th anniversary behind us, we now have two excellent books outlining the company’s complete history.

Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue covers the complete history of the Cupertino tech giant we all know and love. But Pogue intentionally leaves Jobs and NeXT out of the picture for the second quarter of his book — it’s a history of Apple, after all. 

NeXT is the missing puzzle piece of Apple history, and Steve jobs in Exile fills in the gap left by Pogue’s excellent book.

• See also: Apple: The First 50 Years is the best all-in-one history of Apple [Review]

In fact, you could call Steve Jobs in Exile the yin to Apple: The First 50 Years’ yang. Together, the two tell Cupertino’s complete story.

If you already made it through Pogue’s book, you should pick up Cain’s book to get the other side of the coin. Or, better yet, if you’re at exactly page 279 in Apple: The First 50 Years, you should stop reading right now and read Steve Jobs in Exile before carrying on. 

Table of contents: Steve Jobs in Exile review

1. Gain a deeper understanding of what NeXT was all about
2. Short on pictures, tons of research
3. A few wonderful things I learned
4. Available today
5. More book reviews

Gain a deeper understanding of what NeXT was all about Both Apple: The First 50 Years and Steve Jobs in Exile actually use the same photo, but one is very tightly cropped.
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

Steve Jobs in Exile is the result of three years of work by Cain, who as written two previous books and is a former correspondent for The Economist. Cain has also written for major publications like The Wall Street Journal, Time, Foreign Policy, and Wired.

Even most Apple nerds’ understanding of NeXT may be a bit limited: Steve Jobs made the NeXT Computer; it was really expensive and didn’t sell well; Apple bought NeXT to turn its software into Mac OS X and bring Jobs back. 

Steve Jobs in Exile tells a much more nuanced story. While the NeXT Computer arrived well above its projected price, NeXT came this 🤏 close to several major sales deals that might have made the company a real powerhouse.

As you read, you’re rooting hard for this scrappy team of engineers, even though you already know how the story ends. It makes you want to travel back in time just so you can slap Steve across the face for repeatedly blowing it all up. 

All Jobs had to do was ink his name on the dotted line and NeXT would have had a major distribution deal with the federal government across all kinds of three-letter agencies. The CIA, NSA and DoD were all interested in the NeXT Computer’s advanced image-processing capabilities. 

IBM wanted to hedge its bets against Microsoft by licensing a second major operating system; NeXTSTEP would have been a fantastic offering for major business customers. Microsoft, at this time, was not guaranteed to dominate the industry — Windows was still clunky and primitive. But Jobs got cold feet and blew off a critical meeting. IBM executives took the hint and walked away. 

Short on pictures, tons of research Fittingly, the book on the colorful company from Cupertino is in color, while NeXT’s biography is in black and white.
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

Unlike Apple: The First 50 Years, which is printed on big pages in full color, Steve Jobs in Exile is a much more straightforward black-and-white text. Small photos adorn the top of each chapter. But the format suits the material — NeXT was a much less colorful endeavor, both literally and metaphorically. 

It’s also not nearly as long as Pogue’s book, at only 400 pages compared to 608. After all, it only needs to cover 12 years, not 50. The smaller scope also means you get much more depth on that tumultuous period. 

Just like Pogue, Cain interviewed over a hundred key people involved in NeXT’s history. He even had “hours of rate video from NeXT’s internal meetings,” many never-before-seen talks by Steve Jobs. 

It pays off in the richness of knowledge and insight into what was, at the time, a highly mysterious company. It’s amazing how many precise details you can get of meetings, chance encounters and odd stories all these years later. 

The hardcover underneath the dust jacket is black and gray, very fitting colors. It would look great sitting next to some NeXT hardware (if I had any). I like the look of the dust jacket, too. The photo on the front is cropped so tightly that you just see Jobs’ eyes and a few fingers — the big, bold letters box him in. It’s a perfect visual metaphor of Jobs literally trapped within his own narrative. 

A few wonderful things I learned I’m a sucker for a handsome hardcover without the dust jacket.
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

While I fancy myself an expert in Apple trivia, I learned a lot of fascinating tidbits from Steve Jobs in Exile. A few highlights:

• When Jobs first looked at a Newton MessagePad, he messed around with Apple’s proto-PDA for a moment before making a harsh judgment. His reaction was, “This thing is so lame.”
• Jobs was inspired to start a family after staying the night at the house of Ohio Gov. Dick Celeste on a sales trip to Ohio State University. He quietly watched in awe the chaos of an ordinary family breakfast, with people arguing over orange juice, and decided he needed it for himself. 
• NeXT found a niche user base among Hollywood talent agencies. They used its powerful software platform as a database for tracking clients and roles. Image is everything in LA, and a flashy black metal cube on your desk looks a lot cooler than a Tandy.
• John Perry Barlow, editor of NeXTWorld — a short-lived counterpart to MacWorld — was so unsettled by NeXT’s sales relationship with the CIA that he founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
• Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle and notorious shithead, tried to acquire Apple — several times. He invited Jobs to join him in a hostile takeover. Jobs declined because he didn’t want to force his way back into Apple. He wouldn’t feel welcome unless the company asked him to return.
• Everyone knows that Apple ended up acquiring NeXT to save itself from bankruptcy. But who made the first phone call? It wasn’t Jobs or then-Apple CEO Gil Amelio. It was Garrett Rice, a random NeXT product manager who had the idea and called Ellen Hancock, Apple’s CTO at the time.

Available today: Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain

Steve Jobs in Exile is the best way to learn everything there is to know about this forgotten corner in Jobs’ life. It’s an entertaining read, as much about the eclectic clash of characters involved as it is the computers they made.

Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain is available today. You can get a hardcover book as shown, an ebook and/or an audiobook. 

Buy from: Bookshop.org
Buy from: Barnes & Noble
Buy from: Amazon

★★★★★

More books and reviews

• Works of Cult of Mac Editor-in-Chief Leander Kahney: The Cult of Mac, Inside Steve’s Brain, Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level
• Apple: The First 50 Years is the best all-in-one history of Apple
• Best Apple product ever? Most underrated CEO? We interview author David Pogue.
• Small Fry offers complicated portrait of Steve Jobs as a father
• The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life With Steve Jobs