September 23 2026
TL;DR Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary, written by Geoffrey Cain, published in 2026 by Penguin Random House, recounts the life and career of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs between his stints at Apple, starting with his departure in 1985 and ending with his return in 1997, a period spent mostly at NeXT, another company cofounded by Jobs, ultimately acquired by Apple. The book includes a number of stories that I had never heard before and provides key insights into the psyche of Steve Jobs, as much it’s possible understand that. In many ways, it’s a myth-busting book: the long journey of Jobs from losing a power struggle with former Apple CEO John Sculley to becoming Apple CEO himself was more like wandering lost in the desert and stumbling upon an oasis than following a clear, paved road. For anyone interested in Apple history, I highly recommend Steve Jobs in Exile.
Geoffrey Cain is a longtime technology journalist, also author of Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech and The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future. For the book Steve Jobs in Exile, Cain interviewed 111 people, focusing on the cofounders and coworkers of Jobs at NeXT. Of the book’s sources, Cain declares:
I documented and verified every fact in this book with care. I drew primarily on my own interviews, archival materials from Carnegie Mellon University, Yale, Stanford, and the Computer History Museum, as well as press reports and computer science journal articles from the period. My fact checker, Benjamin Kalin, and I conducted three rounds of fact-checking and spent four months verifying every endnote and claim.
Because 25 to 40 years have passed since many of these events, I treated memory with caution. Interviews offered insight and reflection, but I never relied on recollection alone. I corroborated memories with documentary evidence—memos, letters, board minutes, financial statements, court records, video recordings, stock ledgers, business registration documents—and cross-checked them with multiple participants. When a memory seemed unreliable or distorted by time, I left it out.
In reading the book, I encountered no reason to doubt this declaration.
I’m not a conventional reviewer of books, and this will not be a conventional book review. What I want to discuss here are the sentiments and lessons I take away from the book. Last year I wrote a book review of Apple in China by Patrick McGee, from which I’ll quote:
My personal takeaway from Apple in China is that nobody comes out of the book looking good: not Steve Jobs, not Tim Cook, not Terry Gou, not “the Blevinator” Tony Blevins (whom you’ll read about if you haven’t already), and certainly not Chinese government leaders. I intend a double meaning for “good” here. First, I think the book bursts the bubble on the apotheosis of these individuals as prognosticators who could see the future and operated according to a predetermined master plan. Although they were clearly smart and talented enough to capitalize on some (not all) of the opportunities presented to them—opportunities that were often fortuitous—they also made major miscalculations, with deleterious consequences.
[…]
The second, and in my view the more important meaning of “good,” is moral goodness. I think these powerful individuals exhibit a distinct lack of morality and ethics. They egregiously abused their power, constantly exploiting large numbers of people less powerful than them, for no greater purpose than the insatiable pursuit of power, glory, and wealth. The dreadful working conditions of Apple’s contractors in China have already become infamous through reports in the news media; less known, except perhaps to an extent among my own profession of engineering, is how Apple exploits its employees too, at every level, with no more regard for them than for the Foxconn factory workers they often stood side-by-side with in China. All the people in the supply chain, including Apple engineers, are merely cannon fodder in the war for corporate dominance.
Steve Jobs in Exile is bookended by a foreword and afterword that exhibit a curious contrast. The foreword, written by NeXT cofounder Dan’l Lewin, is at times scathing, a shocking start for the reader.
He sometimes let his focus get in his own way. At NeXT, it led him to obsess maniacally on many of the wrong things, relentlessly pursuing perfection at the expense of his company’s viability. It could also make him bruising to work for. He didn’t know how to exempt anyone from his exacting—and often changing—standards, whether they were waiters, top corporate lieutenants, or university presidents. He struggled to show others grace.
[…]
Steve sabotaged important business and distribution relationships. NeXT existed on the perpetual verge of bankruptcy and on the wheel of Steve’s ever-shifting standards. Many of the original team, including me, left as a result of our frustrations with him.
[…]
It was important to me to spend time with my wife and young sons. But Steve made it difficult. He often demanded the leadership team appear in person for weekend meetings, whether on holidays or family birthdays.
Lewin also has praise for Jobs, but the condemnation is difficult to ignore.
In contrast, the afterward, written by Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull, accentuates the positives, emphasizing the “transformation” of Jobs, as if the endpoint excused everything that came before. But it appears that unlike Lewin, Catmull was shielded from Jobs:
Steve’s role at Pixar was distinct from that of a computer company CEO. For the most part, Steve stayed away from our creative process. I even asked him never to come to our brain trust meetings—a gathering of senior executives that solved difficult creative problems. He agreed.
[…]
Our arrangement with Steve was ideal: He believed in our work, funded it generously, and left us to do it largely uninterrupted.
Pixar may have benefited from the existence of NeXT as a time sink and object of focus for Jobs. I suspect that without NeXT to micromanage, Jobs would have experienced greater temptation to interfere with Pixar. In any case, Pixar is proof that Jobs didn’t need to be an overbearing bully to achieve success.
In 1991, Jobs underwent a FBI background check for appointment to the President’s Export Council. The FBI files are public! Geoffrey Cain describes the FBI interviews with coworkers of Jobs:
In these conversations, coworkers struggled to reconcile the visionary with the jerk. “Several individuals questioned Mr. Jobs’ honesty, stating that Mr. Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals,” an FBI agent wrote. One source told the FBI Steve was both “deceptive” and perfect for a “high level political position,” since “honesty and integrity are not required qualities to assume such a position.” Another managed to pack the entire Steve paradox into a single breath, describing his personal life as “lacking due to his narcissism and shallowness,” then saying, “he has far-reaching vision and can vitalize plans and goals.”
Speaking of a high level political position, Jobs pondered entering politics in 1985:
he liked the idea of becoming a larger-than-life historical political figure à la John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. He even talked with two political operatives, Pat Caddell and Scott Miller, about the possibility of running for the Senate. But Steve had a problem: He couldn’t figure out whether to run as a Democrat or a Republican. He had never even registered to vote.
His own coworkers called Jobs a liar and a narcissist. He also appears to have been a master manipulator, with a natural talent for employing various psychological stratagems to convince others to sacrifice themselves for him, almost like a cult leader. Even billionaire Ross Perot, most famously a third-party candidate for US President, less famously an investor in NeXT, felt that he got conned by Jobs, lamenting, “I gave Steve too much dang money.”
Some people claim that Jobs put the computer users first, sacrificed everyone and everything for their sake, but after reading Steve Jobs in Exile, I find that hard to believe. Jobs clearly put himself first and built things that he considered cool. Any satisfaction of the users was merely coincidental, a result of shared characteristics between Jobs and the users. Jobs did have quite a bit in common with ordinary users, because he was not an engineer, nor was he an MBA like the majority of corporate executives (such as Tim Cook!). He was just a technology enthusiast and thought like a technology enthusiast. Nonetheless, countless choices were self-indulgent, with no benefit for the users. For example, Jobs obsessed over the Freemont, California factory that he commissioned to build the NeXT computer, spending huge amounts of money for a startup, imagining (delusionally) that NeXT customers—intended to be universities!—would want a buying “experience” like Ferrari customers.
Though unfinished, the factory was breathtaking. It featured sleek white walls, bright gallery lighting, designer fixtures, a custom-built staircase, and a twice-rebuilt lobby (Steve didn’t like the colors of the first two iterations) with $20,000 black leather chairs. The equipment on the factory floor was cutting edge, striking, and all repainted a matching shade of gray.
Jobs spent money and time just as lavishly on his own office:
By May 1988, NeXT’s financial outlook was also looking seriously gray. The company had $25 million in the bank but needed $27.5 million to survive the year. To make it work, they’d need to sell sixteen thousand machines by year-end. But the team could barely get one to boot properly.
The situation didn’t stop Steve from planning another grand, expensive gesture. As the company approached a hundred employees, Steve told Pat and Ross [Crecine and Perot, board of directors] that the company’s footprint needed to grow. He had found an opportunity for NeXT to move to a brand-new office park, Seaport Centre in Redwood City, overlooking a creek and a marina.
Ross and Pat reviewed the lease, which covered six buildings and would cost nearly $2.5 million in first-year rent, with millions more committed to tenant improvements and campus upgrades. The figures were shocking—NeXT was proposing to spend more on office space than most start-ups raised in total funding. But the board approved it. Steve had sold them on his vision for growth.
As the first tenant at Seaport Centre, NeXT got a generous allowance from the developer to build out its empty office spaces. Even though the job didn’t require any demolition, Steve quickly blew through the allowance.
According to Randall E. Stross, Steve opted to scrap the already built elevators (this was before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act), never mind that their absence would make moving equipment a nightmare. He commissioned a grand, gravity-defying entrance staircase from I. M. Pei’s firm that appeared to float in space. He selected gray, black, and white marble for the dining area. He decided that common spaces would be outfitted with $2,200 chairs and $10,000 sofas. Every desk would bear the highest-quality phone Steve would find—priced at $450 each.
The complicated build-out was scheduled to take a year. The NeXT building itself was designed to generate breakthroughs: corridors arranged to force engineers to collide, creating what one called “organized serendipity.” Steve saw every process, from how people moved through hallways to how they sorted email, as a layout to be optimized.
By the way, this should remind you of Apple Park, designed with the same dubious pseudoscientific theory of organized serendipity. But how would any of it, the factory or the office, benefit the users, who never even visit the buildings? And if you think the office would indirectly benefit the users by directly benefitting the employees, think again! Jobs indulgence included only his own vanity projects, was not extended to his employees.
Because Steve had seeded Next with $7 million of his own personal money, the company’s finance team had assumed he’d be more frugal than he had been at Apple. He even spoke to the staff about the need for disciple and control.
“But he still had the champagne taste he’d gotten used to,” said CFO Susan Barnes. The company’s burn rate climbed as old habits resurfaced: lavish spending, obsessive detail, uncompromising taste. Steve wanted every fact of Next’s image to be perfect.
[…]
When the tile grout in the office bathroom was installed in the wrong color, Steve had the brand-new tiles ripped out and replaced at a cost of about $20,000.
[…]
Steve, ironically enough, criticized the team for buying new equipment instead of scrounging for deals. “We’ve stopped nickel-and-diming for that stuff, and it all adds up ... I don’t see that start-up hustle,” he told them.
Needless to say, Jobs was a massive hypocrite. It seems to me that his spending was not about the users, not even about the success of the company. What he wanted, like most tyrants, was a palace fit for a king.
When the expensive NeXT factory produced its first motherboard by pure automation, with no human hands, Steve said, “This is going to be historic.” Of course Steve was wrong about that. The NeXT hardware business struggled and was unceremoniously terminated. It did not even set a precedent: infamously, the assembly of the wildly successful iPhone depends on large numbers of human workers under inhumane conditions in China. Nonetheless, Jobs, the person who had aspired to be a politician without a platform, was desperate to place his stamp on the world. According to Dan’l Lewin, Jobs held a “lifelong dream of shaping the course of history.”
Jobs did end up shaping the course of history, though I’m not sure it’s for the better. I may be in the minority, but I feel that the smartphone revolution has made the world worse. Smartphones have captured our attention, simultaneously cutting our attention span, and made us less sociable, faces fixed on the tiny screens, as if the Star Trek episode The Game were brought to life. I’m not defending television, which earned similar criticisms and undoubtedly warped my own young mind to an extent. Still, the TV remains fixed in place, can’t fit in one’s pocket, which limits its range and damage. And unlike smartphones, the TVs of the past did not connect to the internet, a practically endless source of stimulation and addiction. The smartphone revolution and concomitant attention economy have also enriched and empowered some of the worst people in the world. Arguably, Jobs was one of those.
The end does not justify the means. Whether we need some new technology at all is a legitimate question for debate; after all, humanity survived and indeed thrived without the smartphone or even the personal computer. I’m (barely) old enough to remember a world without either. On the other hand, whether we need some new technology now is a question that should almost always be answered with a resounding no! Steve Jobs made a name for himself by setting totally arbitrary, unnecessary, pointless deadlines. In the process, he burned out many other people, and perhaps himself too, dead at age 56.
From the first NeXT team retreat in December 1985 (filmed for a PBS documentary, against legal advice, despite the ongoing trade secrets lawsuit filed against NeXT by Apple):
Over the next two days, the team debated two of Steve’s proposed parameters for the project: first, that the machine cost no more than $3,000 as per their conversations with university officials. And second, that the computer would have to launch by spring 1987.
[…]
Ultimately, Steve ended the debate. The team would have eighteen months to build an entire computer—along with its operating system—from scratch, and that would be that.
More than anyone, Steve himself undermined both of the parameters he imposed on the team. However, in his own mind, the problems were never his fault:
When NeXT’s factory schedule inevitably slipped, rather than blaming his own indecision, Steve took out his frustration on Linda [Wilken, VP of manufacturing]. He fired her in January 1987. And per her employment agreement, he forced her to sell back her NeXT stock at its original price of fifty cents a share, even after Ross’s investment had sent NeXT’s valuation soaring.
[…]
Steve cared about how the inside of the computer looked. Each time the chip designers got close to a final layout, Steve would change his mind.
[…]
Steve marched Big Dave and Little Dave [nicknames of engineers] out in front of the entire company and lit into them. “You guys are gonna make the company fail,” Steve raged.
NeXT missed the deadline, missed the price point, and missed the market. In other words, the personal sacrifice of the NeXT team to build a computer, the long hours, the neglected families, the barren social lives, the intense stress and abuse, was for naught. A decade later, in 1997, Apple adopted the operating system NeXTSTEP, yet there was never a good reason to rush a computer out the door in 1987. Steve, who had invented a sense of urgency, wasn’t even right about the company failing.
Serious question: why is technology more important than sleep? Humans need sleep. Steve Jobs claimed that technology alone was not enough, employing a metaphor, the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, but what about the intersection of technology and sleep? Jobs didn’t seem to care about that, at least not when there was a choice between sleep and catering to his technological whims:
With three days to go before the event, audio engineer Julius Smith was in serious trouble. He had spent the summer playing Whac-A-Mole with low-level glitches in NeXT’s audio software. Now, days before demo, the software still wasn’t working. At one in the morning, bleary-eyed and desperate, Julius bumped into Steve and Bud in the NeXT hallway. “How bad would it be if we just played a CD?” he asked, regretting it immediately. Steve fixed him with a lethal stare. “If you can’t get this together,” he said, “you will not have descendants.”
[…]
The night before the launch, Steve and his presentation team stayed up arguing until two in the morning about the exact shade of green that would be used on the projector. The color they settled on would be only one among many background colors used during the presentation. But Steve insisted on getting it exactly right. So there they sat, cycling through a parade of barely distinguishable RGB values in a dark conference room as the night ticked away.
In 2026, should history thank Steve Jobs for getting the background green exactly right in a 1988 product demo that none of us ever saw and that was scheduled by Jobs before the product was even ready? If I were in Steve’s place, I would have let the employees sleep, and even if that meant the world wouldn’t have iPhones and Macs today, I would still sleep easily, as easily as I slept before iPhones and Macs were invented.