I recently read Geoffrey Cain’s new book, “Steve Jobs In Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary,” which was published on May 19, 2026. This was such a great book, well written and well researched.
This is a book I think was way overdue. The twelve years from 1985 to 1997 are not spoken about much in many of the Steve Jobs books, except for his biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I think many people forget about NeXT and the importance of that software company.
The book brings in information about Pixar and how Steve Jobs came to acquire the business from George Lucas, but for the most part, the book focuses on the shortcomings and successes of NeXT.
To start with, Steve Jobs was not fired from Apple; he was put into a useless position and was not feeling fulfilled, so he quit and took several employees with him. He used 7 million of his own money to start NeXT, which would quickly run out due to Jobs’ expensive taste and short-sighted views.
Steve Jobs wanted to run NeXT as a consumer company like Apple, but NeXT computers were not consumer machines; they were “3M” machines, workstations with a megabyte of memory, a million-pixel display, and a processor capable of handling a million instructions per second. These machines were very expensive and very powerful. While overpriced and too powerful for a consumer, they were a great fit for business and government. Two markets that Steve Jobs was not interested in serving made the NeXT hardware business a flop.
The NeXT operating system was revolutionary for the time. Steve Jobs had a deal lined up with IBM. The deal had the potential for NeXT’s operating system to be put on all IBM desktop computers before Microsoft Windows had a firm grip on the PC market. Jobs decided he was uncomfortable working with IBM and declined the deal.
NeXT’s hardware division flopped, but its software business and operating system were its saving grace. The Unix-based operating system made it an acquisition target for Apple, which was desperately looking for a replacement for the aging classic Mac OS.
While Steve did return to Apple in the end, Jobs’s greatest success during the period came with Pixar. While he was more hands-off at Pixar, his investment was well placed and paid off when Pixar went public.
The book really shows Jobs’ transformation from the guy who left Apple to the guy who revived Apple and the business experience he gained along the way.