Steve Jobs in Exile is a fine profile of Jobs’ years at NeXT

I was raised in a Mac household, beginning with the 128k and extending through the Plus, the Classic II, and so many Performas. (One of my dad’s friends even gifted me a Newton. Like Jobs himself, I found the experience of actually using it quite confounding.)

By 1998 and 1999, we were all surfing those Bondi Blue iMac G3 waves—my high school journalism classroom even had a few! It was the dawn of a new millennium, and Y2K fears aside, things were looking pretty good.

At the time, I knew only vaguely about why Apple had struggled—OK, sucked—in the mid-90s. Why did Jobs start NeXT? What happened to a “computer for the rest of us”? What took place between Apple’s glory days of the early 1980s and its iMac-fueled, late-90s renaissance? (And what counts as a “workstation,” anyway?)

Steve Jobs in Exile answers all of these questions and more.

While the general narrative—Jobs left for NeXT but returned to save Apple—is easy to see in hindsight, Cain’s telling brings new tidbits, detailed texture, and three-dimensional characters to the fore in ways that haven’t been fully realized previously.

Three brief passages highlight the amount of new information uncovered by Cain.

Near the middle of the book, Cain writes about how in 1989, NeXT and Jobs hired Adamation, a two-man Black-owned, Oakland-based software development company, to make some of the first software for NeXT’s nascent platform.

While that project for William Morris, a notable Hollywood agency, ultimately fizzled, Cain notes that “Steve [Jobs] protected Adamation’s reputation. He never blamed them publicly for the failure, and NeXT kept sending [Adamation] high-profile clients: the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and then a luxury real estate broker called Alain Pinel Realtors.”