Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary

by Geoffrey Cain

The Untold Story of Steve Jobs's Wilderness Years—and the Creation of a Legend

In 1985, Steve Jobs—the brilliant, volatile founder of Apple Computer—walked out of his company's headquarters, pushed out of the very corporation he had created. What happened next would transform not only his life and career, but the future of technology itself.

For twelve years, from 1985 to 1997, Jobs wandered the business wilderness with his new venture, NeXT. It was a period of spectacular failures, near-bankruptcy, and brutal humiliation. But out of this crucible of defeat emerged the visionary leader who would go on to create the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming Apple into the most valuable company on earth.

Drawing on previously unpublished materials and new interviews with the key players, Geoffrey Cain reveals the untold story of Steve Jobs's "lost decade"—the formative years that shaped the icon we thought we knew. With unprecedented access to unbroadcast footage of Jobs in NeXT meetings, private company documents, and interviews with his closest colleagues, Cain offers the definitive account of how failure transformed a brash wunderkind into a true business genius.

This is the story of how Steve Jobs learned to lead, how he discovered the power of discipline, and how a spectacular failure became the foundation for one of the greatest comebacks in business history. It is nothing less than the missing piece in the legend of Steve Jobs.

Genres: Biography, Business, Nonfiction, History, Technology, Audiobook, Computers

400 pages, Hardcover

Published May 19, 2026

About the author

Geoffrey Cain is an award-winning author and foreign correspondent who sits down with world leaders, tech founders, and dissidents at pivotal moments in history—intimate conversations that grew into his acclaimed books Samsung Rising and The Perfect Police State.

Samsung Rising was longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, while The Perfect Police State was named NPR’s Book of the Day and received a citation for the Cornelius Ryan Award from the Overseas Press Club.

His books have been called “gripping” (Financial Times), a “thriller” (The Wall Street Journal), “riveting” (The Economist and Forbes), “a crisp narrative” (Publishers Weekly), and “a prescient, alarming work” (Kirkus starred review). He is a regular guest on CNN, NPR, Fox News, and Bloomberg Television.

Author portrait © Beowulf Sheehan

Reviews

[Paul Marcos · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a NeXT employee who joined in the last 1/3 of the company's history (through to the Apple merger), the details in this book match all my recollections. It also filled in a whole lot of details that I only ever heard after the fact from coworkers. It's a little weird reading a book about people who sat 3 doors down the hall. 😂

Fun trip through memory lane, and a good record of the years that really helped shape Steve's personality.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nobody else has come close to documenting what made NeXT special.

I went to work for NeXT in 1994, about a year after the hardware was canceled. I loved that job more than it is healthy to love a job. The atmosphere was intoxicating. Everything was elegant. Everybody you worked with was the best, and they cared to make the best whatever they were making. And I mean, this was 1994 when basically the company was at rock bottom and Steve started spending all his time with Pixar. It was the worst time to be at NeXT and still was the best experience I had in my 30 years working in Silicon Valley. Geoffrey Cain helped me relive some of that magic.

At the same time I got to learn more about why it failed. I mean, it succeeded too. It lives on. I use my File Manager in column view to this day. But the missed opportunities! Oh, the missed opportunities! What I've now learned about the IBM deal may haunt me for the rest of my life. I'm made some bone-headed moves in my own life, but oof. At least it's nothing on that scale.

My two favorite parts: He included the washing machine interview! I don't know why. I always remember the washing machine interview. And all the details about Cyberslice. A few years after I left Apple I went to work on streaming entertainment devices. I joke with my family that my career was spent making sure you could have dinner-and-a-movie without ever interacting with another human.

The book starts to drag a bit once NeXT becomes Apple. (In full disclosure, I fell out of love with the job when NeXT became Apple.) If you're bored there like I was, feel free to skip the rest. To my mind there's no new insights in the last chapters. I'm sure the publishers demanded is because the story is half finished if you don't tie NeXT to Apple. But I'll be forever grateful that somebody wrote this book.

[Conner Ratzlaff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful page-turning read that captures the “wilderness years” of Steve Jobs — the years that transformed him to become the visionary leader he is remembered as today.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the Fall, the Foundation
Geoffrey Cain’s ‘Steve Jobs in Exile’ and the Long Afterlife of NeXT
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 28th, 2026

Most failed companies die twice: first in the market, then in memory. NeXT pulled off the harder trick. It failed loudly, beautifully, and at great expense – and then survived under the floorboards of Apple’s second life. Its machines were too late, too costly, too uncompromising, too Steve Jobs in every possible sense. Years later, its software, tools, alumni, habits, and unsettled invoices reappeared in Mac OS X, WebObjects, the iPhone’s development lineage, and the operating machinery that helped bring Apple back. Geoffrey Cain’s “Steve Jobs in Exile” is most alive when it treats NeXT not as the locked middle room between Apple’s two public triumphs, but as understructure: half-forgotten, load-bearing, and still warm below the floor.

The title puts exile on the marquee; Cain sets the lights low. Jobs is pushed out of Apple in 1985. He enters the wilderness of NeXT, fails in cinematic fashion, learns lessons paid in payroll, missed deadlines, and damaged pride, then returns in 1997 with the company that humbled him handing Apple the software foundation it lacked. Cain knows this outline is not sealed history. The Jobs story has been retold so often that even its silences have a commemorative aisle. His wager is narrower and better: what if the so-called lost decade was not an interruption in the legend, but the workshop where the later Jobs was sanded, not softened?

The shape is clean: exile first, revelation later, with NeXT as the workshop where humiliation learns to speak software. This is not a full-life Jobs itinerary, nor a boardroom resurrection story with cleaner fonts. It is a study of what happens when the traits that once looked like magic from a distance – taste, focus, force, impatience, theatrical certainty – stop being enough. At Apple, they made Jobs famous. At NeXT, they hardened into liability. The company gathered brilliant people, pursued technology ahead of its market, and then ran into the unromantic arithmetic of buyers, developers, distribution, and universities that did not wish to pay handsomely for the privilege of being lectured by a cube.

Cain’s basic arc moves quickly. Jobs leaves Apple bruised and furious. He founds NeXT to build a computer for higher education. He attracts an extraordinary team, obsesses over every surface and system, produces a beautiful machine buyers decline, pivots toward software, and eventually sells NeXT to Apple. From there, NeXT’s operating system and tools become part of Apple’s rescue apparatus. The charge comes from the contradictions Cain is wise not to dissolve. NeXT is wreckage that later holds weight. Jobs is visionary and bill. Failure is humiliation and inheritance. Apple’s second act happened; the question is what it cost.

Dan’l Lewin, NeXT cofounder and the book’s foreword witness, gives Cain his first useful close-up. He remembers meeting the young Jobs in 1977: greasy hair, Birkenstocks, blue jeans with holes, badly in need of a shower, already curious about Sony’s products. Jobs studies a brochure by rubbing the paper between his fingers. It is a tiny gesture, almost funny in its intensity, and it tells us more than a paragraph of design mysticism. Jobs does not merely read the brochure. He tests it with his skin. Here is attention as craft. Here, too, is attention as hazard. In Lewin’s account, the same trait that made Jobs extraordinary made him bruising, exacting, and capable of polishing the wrong surface while distribution, pricing, and market fit suffered elsewhere.

Cain’s most useful subject is not genius. It is genius pointed at the wrong problem. NeXT lets him show the difference between vision and viability, dream and purchase order, prophecy and invoice. The Cube is the book’s mascot and warning label: matte-black, magnesium-skinned, gorgeous, stubborn, too expensive for its intended buyers, and overbuilt enough to become its own punch line. In one of the book’s most memorable visual afterlives, the Cube receives a kind of Viking funeral and resists even that. Beautiful failure is still failure; the market has never been especially moved by good cheekbones at a funeral.

The book thinks best through objects. The Sony brochure, the Cube, the Blue Box, WebObjects, the “NS” initials lingering in Apple code, the wine bottles Paul Vais is carrying on the day Jobs dies – these give the narrative its object-based intelligence. Cain is not a lavish stylist. His sentences usually move with clean reportorial drive, built for readers who want company history, product lineage, and the machinery of command without getting lost in a software thicket. His diction is plain enough to keep the machinery visible, then raised when the mythic frame appears: wilderness, crucible, beginner’s mind, return. At moments, that vocabulary becomes too orderly. The book occasionally posts signs through a forest that might have been allowed to stay darker. But the clarity is rarely dull. Cain knows when an idea needs to become touchable.

The frame saves the material from becoming a parts drawer. The three-part design, Jobs’s Stanford address on the “lightness of being a beginner again,” the Dante epigraph, Lewin’s foreword, Ed Catmull’s afterword, and the epilogue titled “The Long Road Home” all make the pattern unmistakable: fall, wandering, ordeal, return. It is an effective scaffold because NeXT needs wide framing. Without it, the story could sink into product meetings, capital anxieties, internal feuds, depositions, launch theatrics, and the usual Valley weather system: ego, talent, money, prophecy. With it, we can see why this difficult middle mattered.

The danger is that the frame starts congratulating itself. Cain’s later “NeXT lessons” are lucid: do not repeat failures, bend your vision, listen to your people, remember that total control requires total capability. They are often persuasive. They also make the story feel, at times, like a jagged corporate history converted into a leadership card. The problem is not that the lessons are false. It is that the material is stranger than the labels. NeXT was not a seminar in personal growth. It was a place where people worked punishing hours, fought over impossible standards, watched brilliant products miss their market, and carried anger long after the company’s hardware dreams had cooled in the drawer.

The Blue Box may be the book’s sharpest metaphor. It allowed older Mac software to run inside Apple’s new NeXT-derived system, letting the past remain functional while the future booted up around it. NeXT did not become the standard-setting computer for higher education. It did not win the category it imagined for itself. But it survived inside Apple as operating system, development framework, software philosophy, backend engine, credential, memory, and scar tissue. The younger Jobs had wanted the future to arrive cleanly, by decree. The older Jobs learned that sometimes the old world must keep breathing inside the new one until the future can stand without assistance. Revolution, inconveniently, may require a compatibility layer.

That idea gives the book its quiet moral intelligence. NeXT’s failure is not interesting because later success magically redeems it. It is interesting because the failure keeps changing form. It becomes code. It becomes a recruiting signal. It becomes institutional memory. It becomes a private grievance that former employees carry for decades. It becomes a set of instincts Jobs later learns to refine rather than merely repeat. Cain’s best pages understand that failure is not always a grave; sometimes it is a pressure chamber, sometimes a seed bank, sometimes an unpaid bill. NeXT is all three.

The present does not need to be stapled on; it keeps arriving of its own accord. “Steve Jobs in Exile” brushes against arguments about founder command, closed systems, burnout, and the romance of impossible standards without chasing them. Its durable question is simpler: when does exacting vision enlarge the people around it, and when does it make them small? Jobs’s second Apple era is often treated as proof that total integration was his destiny. Cain complicates that. At NeXT, total control was a fantasy without enough institutional muscle. At Apple, after failure, better timing, stronger teams, lower component costs, and deeper resources, it became strategy. The dream was similar. The capacity was not.

The epilogue is one of Cain’s strongest choices because he refuses to end with Apple’s resurrection alone. He begins instead with Jobs’s death on October 5, 2011, and with the complicated grief moving through the NeXT alumni network. Former employees remember a man who humiliated them, made them feel expendable, demanded more than seemed reasonable, and altered the course of their lives. Some feel old anger loosen after his death; others sit stunned by the absence of a man they had not quite forgiven. Todd Rulon-Miller’s memorial recollection – Jobs had “a big heart,” carefully hidden – captures the feeling the book keeps returning to: affection with scar tissue, gratitude with its jaw clenched.

This is where Cain’s portrait separates itself from standard Jobs portraiture. Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli’s “Becoming Steve Jobs” remains the natural comparison for the transformation arc, while Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine” hovers nearby whenever Cain enters the pressure chamber of technical ambition. But “Steve Jobs in Exile” is narrower than the former and more retrospective than the latter: less an immersion in engineering drama than an excavation of the buried mechanisms by which a failed company helped make a later triumph possible. Its real subject is not simply the machine being built, or even the man insisting it be built better. It is what remains after the machine fails and the insistence does not.

Catmull’s afterword lets Pixar testify. His Jobs remains intense, quick, demanding, and formidable, but he is also more capable of restraint. He funds Pixar heavily, argues forcefully, values disagreement, and largely stays out of the creative rooms where he knows he does not belong. That testimony matters because it counters the NeXT version of Jobs who could mistake force for authority. Catmull’s claim sharpens Cain’s larger point: Jobs’s later power did not come from preserving every early habit. It came from learning which habits had nearly ruined him.

The book’s limitation should not be politely escorted out the side door. Cain’s admiration for transformation sometimes threatens to domesticate the damage. The prose is candid about cruelty and humiliation, but the overall arc leans strongly toward redemption. Lewin says Jobs changed. The epilogue says Jobs changed. Catmull says Jobs changed. The chorus is persuasive, but it is still a chorus. One occasionally wants more dissonance – more room for the possibility that some injuries do not become more meaningful because the person who caused them later became more effective. The book is at its best when those injuries remain in the room, not when they start to look like tuition for Apple’s second act.

Causality is the one place where the comeback machinery hums a little too smoothly. Cain makes a convincing case that NeXT was essential to Apple’s later revival, especially through NeXTSTEP, Mac OS X, WebObjects, and the broader philosophy of integrated hardware, software, and services. Yet Apple’s recovery had many makers: designers, engineers, operators, pricing decisions, supply chains, developer relations, retail strategy, and a deep executive bench. Cain’s reporting base – interviews, private archives, internal footage, technical documents, court records – gives the legend weight-bearing beams. Even so, the stage light keeps finding Jobs’s face. Any book about him has to fight the old optical problem: he bends the room toward himself.

What keeps “Steve Jobs in Exile” from becoming mere legend repair is its interest in residue. The “NS” initials lingering in Apple code form the perfect emblem: NeXT surviving not as brand, not as consumer memory, but as a mark under the surface. The ex-NeXTers’ jokes whenever Apple later unveiled some “revolutionary” feature they had built years earlier add a ghostly chorus. Here the failed past heckles the triumphant present from inside its own machinery. Silicon Valley has always had a talent for renaming old ideas at launch events; Cain gives the old ideas their forwarding address.

The image credits deepen this shadow narrative. They are not merely documentary captions. They interpret. Jobs laughing in a rented school bus after visiting the NeXT factory. Jobs touching the magnesium Cube, interrogating every millimeter while costs rise. Jobs at a picnic, “pretending to be human.” The Burning Cube as funeral, joke, diagnosis. These images show a man performing ease, enforcing standards, glimpsing futures, misreading buyers, and occasionally being ridiculous in the grand tradition of founders who treat impossibility as a scheduling issue.

Its artistry is architectural: not jeweled sentences, but rooms arranged so the echoes carry. Cain teaches us to see NeXT as company, classroom, wound, archive, and seedbed. He makes software inheritance emotionally legible. He makes commercial failure feel less like burial than compression: a layer altered by pressure, still shaping the ground above it. The prose works because it rarely asks to be admired for itself. It would rather point to the object on the table – the brochure, the cube, the code mark, the old grievance – and let that object begin speaking.

My final rating is 84/100, which corresponds to 4/5 Goodreads stars. That feels right for a book with a powerful frame, serious sourcing, vivid symbols, and a persuasive argument, but also one whose lesson-making instinct sometimes smooths the rougher edges of its own evidence. Its best pages understand that the most important thing about NeXT is not that it failed, nor even that Apple later needed it. The important thing is that it failed in a way that did not stay dead.

Cain’s Jobs is not redeemed by victory so much as complicated by aftermath. The Cube burns and does not quite burn. The code keeps its old initials. The mourners gather with laughter, grievance, and gratitude in the same room. The failed company vanishes from the shelf and returns as the floor.

[Brian Clegg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the big name IT people, none is revered in quite the same way as Steve Jobs was by Apple fans. But it's easy to forget that for a formative period in his career, Jobs was pushed out of Apple, starting NeXT, a startup to produce high power workstations.

Taking a handful of top people with him, Jobs faced a legal onslaught for a few months from Apple - but given they had no product, not even a design, he was able to continue with the production of one of the most remarkably brilliant failures in IT history. The NeXT box solidified what was great and awful about Jobs - his far sighted ideas and his obsession with detail that led, for instance, to spending $100,000 on the logo design alone, something no startup could afford.

Although the final product was brilliant, it was too expensive and too different from everything else to succeed. Geoffrey Cain gives us excellent chapter and verse on the whole episode that is often brushed over in Jobs' history. It's a reminder, apart from anything else, of how young he was - only just in his thirties when this happened. There are some excellent stories of just scraping through over everything from technical challenges to the difficulties caused by Jobs' personality. I was hooked.

What comes across strongly is that the disaster of NeXT was what was needed to help Jobs grow up to become the more effective force he was when he returned to Apple. This was after the effective collapse of NeXT, though ironically Jobs had just become a billionaire thanks to Toy Story, a triumph for his other company, Pixar. Revivifying Apple, which ends the book, is just as interesting as the NeXT story - I hadn't realised what a dire state Apple was in at this point, and how NeXT's operating system expertise - the one part of the venture that was truly successful - was folded into Apple, making the brilliant new Mac operating system possible.

This is a double blast for the past for me. When I worked in IT in the 1980s and early 90s I lapped up the popular biographies of the likes of Jobs and Gates - or even biographies of the technology, such as Steven Levy's Insanely Great on the Mac. Steve Jobs in Exile is very much in this classic style of the tech bio. But I also attended Jobs' launch of the NeXT computer in London in 1990 and saw his reality distortion field in action. As soon as they were commercially available, I had a NeXT box on my desk (actually at home on the dining table for a few weeks, as we were moving offices).

It was a thing of beauty - just as Jobs wanted it to be - and though monochrome, the graphics were astounding when compared with anything we'd experienced on PCs or Macs. You could see in principle the potential of the object oriented programming features that were central to the NeXT's existence. But despite the enthusiasm of tech geeks, most people don't want to do their own programming - they want off-the-shelf tools to do a job and those were sadly lacking. The hardware was a beautiful failure, but a failure nonetheless.

There is sometimes too much detail here that we don't really need - especially as for several years developments were a constant, slow motion car crash, veering from one disaster to the next - but still it's a fascinating portrayal of a key step in both the career of Jobs and, when he rejoined Apple, in taking the steps resulting in the amazing Macs we see today.

[Rob Sligh · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1985, Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple, the company he co-founded. He took five Apple employees with him, gathered them in his living room, and started over. The company they built, NeXT, consumed the next twelve years of his life. It was a period of failures, near bankruptcy, and public humiliation. It was also the period that transformed an impulsive, brilliant, often cruel young founder into the more disciplined leader who would ultimately drive one of the greatest comebacks in business history.

The NeXT years were defined by a collision between extraordinary technology and self-defeating leadership. The NeXT computer introduced much of the architecture of next-generation computing: a powerful UNIX foundation, the NeXTSTEP operating system, object-oriented programming, and Interface Builder, a tool that let developers create software with unprecedented speed. Tim Berners-Lee built the World Wide Web on a NeXT machine.

But Steve was his own worst enemy. He spent $100,000 on a logo, built a factory capable of producing 150,000 computers a year for a product that never sold in volume, leased lavish offices, and let perfection become the enemy of the good. He blew up at co-founders and employees and damaged relationships with investors, partners, and customers. The hardware business collapsed, and in 1993 NeXT abandoned computers entirely to survive as a software company.

That humiliation forced personal growth. Stripped of money, momentum, and mystique, Steve learned lessons that eluded him during his early success at Apple: discipline, patience, how to listen, and how to lead people rather than overpowering them. During these years he also led Pixar, absorbing a different model of creative management.

When Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and Steve returned to the company that cast him out, he brought with him both the operating system that became the foundation for Apple products and the tempered disposition required to save it.

The debates the book recounts, over transformative new technologies, skepticism about their promise, uneasy deals with government and the military, and fights over encryption, all echo in today's public square. The deeper lesson is simpler: failure, honestly absorbed, is a powerful teacher.

[Mark Lieberman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this book from Netgalley so I can read and review it before it's published. About a month ago, I read Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue, but it didn't go into detail like this book did about NeXT from 1985 to 1997.

This book detailed what happened to Steve that got him ousted from Apple in 1985 and his triumphant return to the head job at Apple in 1997 from a lot of the players (including Jobs) involved with NeXT.

Of course, when Jobs left Apple and became the CEO of NeXT, Apple sued because they didn't want him building something similar to the current Apple products. A lot of former Apple employees went with Jobs, well, because he was Steve Jobs. He may not have been the best boss, but they didn't care. He had a vision for perfection, he was smart, and a knack for design.

Even though, the computer's NeXT made weren't mainstream, and never got accepted, NeXT had it's ups and downs (money wise), and wasn't as successful as it should've been. Cain explains a lot of what was happening with the company. What did set NeXT up for success was their exquisite software, and one of those was called WebObjects. When Jobs demonstrated to the public, he enlisted the founders of a company called CyberSlice (they were inspired by a scene from the 1995 movie starring Sandra Bullock called The Net as she ordered a pizza online). Jobs placed an order for a pizza, and lo and behold, it worked and a few minutes later, a delivery person walked into where Jobs was and delivered a pizza.

In 1986, Jobs purchased the Pixar Animation from George Lucas. Lucas basically gave it away for $5 million dollars! As CEO, Jobs let the animators run the company and do the work, and that was a huge payoff for Jobs.

In 1997, Apple was looking for an operating system to compete with Windows, and the operating system NeXT had was perfect. So, Apple brought the company and reluctantly Steve Jobs came back. In 2000, Jobs was named CEO of Apple, and we all know the story from there.

Had Apple not come knocking, what would've happened to NeXT and Pixar?

[Max Nussenbaum · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book did something I didn’t think it was possible for a book on this incredibly over-covered subject to do: actually change my understanding of Steve Jobs.

I had always understood the NeXT story as, roughly: Jobs starts another computer company, but it goes sideways both because of market timing and his immature leadership; he pulls off a deus ex machina sale to Apple and returns triumphant. That’s still more or less true, but until this book I didn’t realize the extent to which that immature leadership wasn’t just poor business decisions, but constant self-sabotage/emotional tantrums. Turning down government contracts at the last minute by ghosting the dealmakers, canceling a promising partnership with IBM because he just doesn’t like them, etc. It’s hard to tell whether this is accurate analysis or wishful thinking, but many NeXT employees to this day believe the company could have succeeded if Jobs hadn’t repeatedly and unnecessary shot it in the foot.

A few other thoughts:

Among other things, this story is a testament to the importance of entrepreneurs building something they truly care about. The market was ferociously pushing NeXT into the B2B world, and Jobs just (emotionally) couldn’t do it. He wanted to make consumer products and couldn’t force himself to do otherwise.

Jobs’ well-documented obsession with detail and unreasonable aesthetic standards are shown in full glory here—i.e., when he insists on repainting the NeXT factory’s walls—at great expense—because the color is slightly wrong. Obviously, this was insane and he couldn’t really succeed until he learned to tamp this down somewhat. But it’s probably easier for someone to take this kind of obsession from 11 down to 8 than for someone who doesn’t really care about this kind of thing to go up from 3 —> 8. Maybe you have to start insane and dial it back.

It’s amazing how closely Jobs’ story follows the Hero’s Journey. Either Campbell was really onto something when he claimed that’s a universal structure or this is just one incredible coincidence.

[*TUDOR^QUEEN* · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steve Jobs is a fascinating personality to read about as a co-founder of Apple Computers, with its legacy of inventing the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPad, and iPhone. However, there was a period when Steve was kicked out of his own company Apple, when he started anew, creating another computer company called NeXT. During this time, he also bought Pixar from George Lucas and became its proud CEO. Pixar's computer animation comprised the iconic children's movie "Toy Story". This was a very challenging time for Steve Jobs which informed his own personal development and transformation that precipitated his triumphant return to Apple as CEO.

The book was detail rich with the step-by-step creation of the NeXT cube computer, from its aesthetics (which Steve obsessed about) to its groundbreaking software (which Apple ultimately absorbed). It also was interesting to read about all the other computer companies and main players and their constant interactions, such as Bill Gates and Microsoft, Sun Computers, and IBM. Ross Perot even played a part in NeXT's history.

The business dealings involved with running a computer company were mind bending with recruiting staff, investors, contracts with stores, the government, colleges, and making payroll. Some of the financial stuff became monotonous and dry to read about, but this was a very well researched book. It filled in a piece of the puzzle to inform how Steve Jobs "grew up" in a sense and became humbled from some business failures and learned from his mistakes. He learned the importance of meeting customers' needs which rescued Apple upon his return.

Thank you to the publisher Portfolio for providing an advance reader copy via NetGalley.

[Alana Zerbe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I doubt many readers will view this as a self-help book, but maybe they should. I think of Jobs as the first enfant terrible of Silicon Valley: a shoeless egotist consuming dates, reciting koans, and tearing into employees for using the wrong shade of vermilion. I both loathe and love reading about him. His solipsistic empire-building smacks of 80s excess, but his creativity, drive, and focus were unparalleled.

Jobs in Exile excels at detailing the period when he rent his garments (which in his case meant donning dress shoes and a suit) after being ousted from Apple and beginning his new venture, NeXT. The book resists a hagiographic rendering of this time: plenty of juicy anecdotes exist about his famed "reality distortion field" and his absolutely shocking behavior towards — of all people — Ross Perot.

But it also tells the story of Jobs falling in love (from the stage, natch) and how much his family changed him. In fact, his childhood wonder of family settings appears as a leitmotif throughout the book. We also learn more about his best — and perhaps only — friend, Larry Ellison. It was Ellison who engineered Steve's return to Apple, and by this stage of the book, his reservations about returning signal a newfound appreciation for how quickly strengths can turn into weaknesses, and bonds can be broken under stress. It's subtle but significant.

The complete arc of Jobs's life stands as testament that exile, failure, and public humiliation are not termini but raw material — a sneakily Buddhist theme in the end that makes for an outstanding read.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an important (and well written) chronicle of how a computer wound up on the desk of every person in America. We see the PC vs Mac battle and how NeXt tried and failed to take over the computer hardware industry: A recurring theme of the book was the ideological differences between Steve Jobs’ vision of a closed platform with end-to-end control and Bill Gates’ vision of an open system that is endlessly customizable. If you finish reading the story at NeXT’s acquisition, you’d say that Gates’s open empire won! But if you continue the story through the iPhone, you’d say that Jobs’ closed platform won. My takeaway: both are good ways of building technology, closed platforms can scale quicker and more easily, but open platforms provide a level of control over the system to make something unique and soulful.

The most poignant part of the book for me was about NeXTSTEP’s Interface Builder - a development environment that allowed anyone to build software. By lowering the technical bar for development, NeXT invited more people into the innovation process.

Narratively, this is Steve Jobs’ Hero’s Journey. A genius asshole is exiled from his company, given 12 years in the wilderness (NeXT) to fail and transform into the leader who came back to Apple to lead its Renaissance. This book has many lessons on the dawn of the personal computer age and is by far my most annotated book to date!

[Joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steve Jobs in Exile was a fascinating look into one of the most influential figures in the tech world which now dominates American industry and society (I saw this as I write from my Mac, wearing an Apple watch, with my iPhone next to me). There have been few people as synonymous with the companies that they helped found as Steve Jobs and Apple, and this book presented a brand new look into Jobs' psyche and growth as a person and entrepreneur.

Cain has a way of making a profoundly complicated man and story accessible and interesting without making Jobs into a simplistic caricature and painting him in a predetermined light. Instead, Cain dug deep into archives and conducted what must have been many, many interviews with those who knew Jobs during the NeXT days to unearth new information and stories about a man who has shaped many of our lives through his design and product development choices and who founded one of the most valuable and best known companies in the world.

For those who are Apple geeks (and who like me, lined up to get the first iPhone when it was released) this book is an absolute must read, but it is also a must read for all of us who now live with the legacy of a complicated man who was very much a human with faults, foibles, and feelings, albeit a very brilliant one. Do go pick up this book -- it is well worth your time.

[Rob Warner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember the first time I saw a NeXT cube, in the university bookstore. It was Spring 1990. I had spent the past two years in South America, far from the latest news or technology, so knew nothing about it. The machine looked amazing, the display looked exquisite, and the price tag was eye-watering. My parents had just funded a no-name 286 and an HP DeskJet 500, and I pushed through an EGA monitor and graphics card. And that felt state-of-the-art, but nowhere near as glorious as this machine. Most students didn't even have computers, so I had many visitors, typing their papers on my WordPerfect 5.1.

I never really paid attention to NeXT after that, as it seemed so exotic and out of reach. So much of this story was news to me, and it was fascinating. I didn't know that Steve himself sabotaged some relationships that might have changed the arc of the NeXT story, with his petulance and need for control. Or how fully Pixar saved Steve.

I've read the Amelio book about the NeXT acquisition. One thing he'd harped on about Be was the lack of printer support in their OS, which seemed to be the tipping point against it. This book paints that story differently. Both sides may be incomplete parts of a whole.

Jobs and his creations have had an outsized effect on how we live. That's probably why he's so fascinating. I couldn't put this book down.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cain’s take on Steve Jobs is the rare tech bio that feels both intimate and expansive, part character study and part high-stakes chronicle of the modern innovation era. Cain writes with the kind of narrative propulsion that makes you forget you’re reading nonfiction while still delivering the rigor you expect from serious journalism. That's why I always read his writing, no matter the topic.

But what makes this book stand out from even his own work is how he humanizes a figure who has been mythologized to the point of caricature. Jobs emerges not as a marble statue of genius but as an obsessive builder who is at once brilliant, demanding, maddening, and relentlessly focused on bending tech to human experience. Cain captures all of this beautifully.

If you're an Apple fan, an Apple hater, or just someone who has ever used an Apple product, grab this book. Even if you're none of the above, given how much Apple has shaped the modern tech world, it's still worth a read.

[Meredith · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's truly mind-boggling to me that Steve Jobs kept "blowing up [business] deals and chasing perfect control over his hardware and software rather than sustainable profit" (page 209). He had lucrative partnerships with IBM and Ross Perot that would ensure NeXT remained solvent and he said, "I'm just really busy today. And I'm just not going to go" (page 159).

The author tries to spin Jobs' failures at NeXT as the blueprint for why he succeeded in his return to Apple; yet, if Apple hadn't bought NeXT (and Steve hadn't replaced the board with loyalists to set up his ascendancy), this wouldn't be the "remaking of an American visionary." It would be the autopsy of how hubris convinces men they're infallible instead of infantile.

[Joan Blendowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a self proclaimed Steve Jobs / Apple Fan-girl this book was FANTASTIC!! Geoffrey Cain's writing is beautifully done, chock full of facts and details but such a joy to read. I have read many things on Steve Jobs and this is definitely the missing piece. So much insight in this "missing chapter" of his career, showing what a journey of self discovery he was on in his life. It was fascinating to go back in time to when the things we take for granted today were mere concepts or their infancy. While not always easy, he was truly a visionary and changed the world as we know it... 11/10 read! I highly recommend for anyone interested in Steve Jobs, Apple, The Tech Bubble, Computers in general... this book is for you! Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Random House.

[Keith Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having started my adult life as both a musician and a writer, I have hung with a few artists in my day. Which also means I have been friends with many Apple devotees. Since I am as old as Methuselah, that also means I am talking about the Mac era.

I always noticed the drastic difference between the first era of Steve Jobs at Apple and the second one. The NeXT interlude is one of the most fascinating chapters of the Steve Jobs story, and probably the most important to know if you are a fan of today's Apple or someone who wants insights into tech leadership or how to reinvent a company. Or even to understand the rubric of creativity.

This may be the only book I will ever recommend to both bankers and democratic socialists.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This latest book about Steve Jobs documents his years at NeXT, after he was fired from Apple. Interestingly, several names from the current administration pop up in this book, most notably Steve's best friend Larry Ellison. The story is of the company, Steve's volatile personality and genius which, ultimately, couldn't save NeXT, and the people involved. It documents the changes he went through during his time there as a taskmaster to a more empathetic human. Highly recommended for Jobs/Apple completists. Many thanks to NetGalley for the eARC.

[Bruce Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am very happy that this book was written. It takes a no-nonsense, no hagiography look at NeXT, and it's CEO Steve Jobs. Steve was a difficult person to work around, and Geoffrey Cain pulls no punches, and holds back no praise. I strongly recommend this book, it is a story of persistence and determination in the face of enormous (usually self-induced) headwinds. The broader arc about how this mad genius was able to attract a once in a generation team, and lead them to change the world is front and center.

[Topherjaynes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always enjoyed reading about this time in Job's life, mainly because it overlaps with so much innovation in tech. I wish there were more about the Pixar involvement, but there are already a few books out there about that, and those usually don't go into much detail about Jobs. I had forgotten how much Next software pushed the industry forward, and had no clue Tim Berners Lee used a Nextcube for the first web server. Wild.

Great view on another aspect of Jobs life, a lot of technical details as well

[Ben Ginsburg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, to be a fly on the wall through these formative years with Jobs, watching him transform and become the icon that we all saw bring about Apple's renaissance. Paired with other books on Apple's history, this fills in an important gap in the story in an engaging way. Tons of little anecdotes and stories to reveal just what it was like to be behind the scenes. Highly recommend to anyone who wants to understand the modern technical world.

[Rodney Haydon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this history of the career of Steve Jobs between his two stints with Apple. Maybe it is just me, but I wish the author had used people's full names more often. I found myself sometimes confused on who he was quoting, and having to go back to see who the individual was.
I plan on going through Geoffrey Cain's endnotes and bibliography as I find the history of Apple Computer and the people involved extremely interesting.

[Curtis Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. There was a lot of interesting material but this book needed considerably better editing. It felt like a series of blog excerpts written over a long period of time and then rushed together. Many facts repeating over and over as if the author didn’t go through the material himself before producing the next post er… chapter. Felt rushed. Clearly the author also did not live through these times and missed the significance of many of the subjects and people he quoted.

[Kevin Parsons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley. This was a great read with details about the years Steve Jobs was not at Apple and how his time at Pixar and NeXT (both his successes and failures) led him to the innovations and successes he had back at Apple. This book fills in some valuable details not covered in previous books about Jobs and Apple.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steve Jobs in Exile was a great book that honed in on a period of time of one of the most important of the technology revolution. It was an amazing case study in how Job’s leadership style evolved over time and laid the foundation for his return to Apple. The timeline and stories are great and connect the dots between myth and reality. Great read for those Apple fans.

[Andrew C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Real as the day is long

What a romp through the past that truly made the future! A long overdue dive into "the dark years" which truly shaped Steve's later successes.

I couldn't put it down, you will learn what hasn't been common knowledge but is critical to understanding how we got to where we are today.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book that fills a gap in the life of an important figure in the tech world.

The book describes Job's supposed transformation from an unfeeling dreamer to a sold-out business person and finally to a realistic visionary. My guess is that all aspects remained true throughout, but he learned from what were very costly mistakes.

[Alfredo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the central book about Steve Jobs. His years of change outside Apple, when he changed and became the person that truly changed the world. While others imitate Steve outward demeanor few have learned the lessons he learned. This is the best book to try to learn them short of living failure by yourself.

[Jose Antonio La Rosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly awesome book!!!

This is an amazing book!!!
Wise, easy and fun to read.
A page turner that you want to last longer.
Thank you very much!!!

[Alex M. Bendersky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting 😎