New book ‘Steve Jobs in Exile’ reads like a lost season of your favorite series

This week marked the release of “Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary,” by author Geoffrey Cain, a delightfully comprehensive book that delves deep into the years most people overlook when recounting the Apple co-founder’s famous redemption story.

“Steve Jobs in Exile” adds interesting tidbits to what you think you know about Steve Jobs

There is a scene in Kevin Smith’s “Dogma” where Rufus, the forgotten 13th apostle played by Chris Rock, notes:

In the Bible, Jesus goes from twelve to thirty. This is pretty bad storytelling.

And while Steve Jobs was No Jesus Christ, I kept coming back to this notion of lost memory while devouring Geoffrey Cain’s new book, Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary.

As Cain notes in the book’s acknowledgments, Steve Jobs in Exile is the product of years of research, largely enriched by interviews with “111 people who volunteered their time” and shared their lived experiences before, during and after Steve Jobs’ years in the wilderness.

This includes NeXT co-founders such as Dan’l Lewin, Susan Barnes, Rich Page, George Crow and Bud Tribble, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, NeXT alumni turned (former) Apple executives Jon Rubinstein and Bertrand Serlet, photographer Doug Menuez and former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée, to name a few.

Divided into three parts containing 28 chapters and an epilogue, plus a foreword by Lewin and an afterword by Catmull, the book tackles the difficult task of telling a story that most people know how it ends, by presenting new information drawn directly from the personal archives and memories of key people who were in the room for discussions and events that otherwise would have been completely lost to time.

Steve Jobs in Exile also strives to present just the right amount of technical detail so as not to overwhelm less technically inclined readers who might be interested in Jobs’s “lost years,” but without ever underestimating the reader.

From the relevance and technical aspects of WebObjects to the details of accounting and stock compensation, the book never treats the reader as if the difficult parts need to be toned down or glossed over. Cain even concocts an object-oriented programming analogy that I will absolutely use from now on.

Another interesting aspect of Steve Jobs in Exile is how today’s major technology themes are just repeats of past dramas, issues, and policies.

From the lure of an all-American computer to no-code development, skepticism of transformative new technologies, uncomfortable deals with the military, the government’s problem with cryptography, and even Steve Jobs’ desire for NeXT users to “have access to a full creative studio” in contrast to Apple’s recent launch of the subscription-based Creative Studio suite, revisiting Steve Jobs’ “lost” years at NeXT seemed surprisingly contemporary.

As for Steve Jobs himself, there’s a familiar element to the person that most Apple watchers probably know well by now: vindictive and mercurial, but also generous and indecisive. This is to be expected. After all, he was still the same man. But Steve Jobs in Exile adds a new layer to these contradictions, showing Jobs as a far more reluctant leader than the myth often suggests, as he faced the lives he was giving up to live the one he was living, to paraphrase the man himself.

Perhaps most importantly for anyone interested in the true story of Apple, Steve Jobs, and NeXT, Steve Jobs in Exile helps demystify and debunk some of the misconceptions that have permeated the broader zeitgeist in recent years, particularly those reinforced by Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs. (I love them both, but it wasn’t their finest hour.)

Steve Jobs in Exile begins and ends in very familiar territory. But it introduces details, interesting quotes, even more important anecdotes, and just the right amount of cinematic intrigue to make you wonder how some of these stories remained untold for so long, and be grateful as I am that they weren’t lost to time.

You can buy Steve Jobs in Exile on Amazon. And don’t forget to check out the most recent episode of 9to5Mac’s Apple@Work podcast, where host Bradley Chambers interviews author Geoffrey Cain about the book.

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