Geoffrey Cain's new book revisits Steve Jobs's forgotten 12 years at NeXT

Journalist Geoffrey Cain’s forthcoming book Steve Jobs in Exile, out 19 May 2026, examines the period from 1985 to 1997 when Jobs ran NeXT Computer after being pushed out of Apple. Cain argues the dominant Jobs narrative skips over roughly a third of his adult life and obscures what actually shaped him into the executive who later led the Apple revival. NeXT’s hardware business failed and forced mass layoffs, but its object-oriented software stack became the foundation of every modern Apple operating system, and it hosted what was effectively the first app store in 1988.

Cain frames NeXT as the school where Jobs learned discipline, market constraint, and how to translate his hardware-software integration vision into something customers would actually buy. Jobs’s NeXT customers — universities, labs, and intelligence agencies — cared about the software far more than the expensive workstations, a lesson he initially missed. Pixar followed a similar arc: Jobs again bet wrong on hardware, shut that division down, and succeeded only after Ed Catmull and John Lasseter made him agree to stay out of creative meetings, with the Pixar IPO ultimately making him a billionaire.

The interview lands as Apple, now 50, prepares another CEO handoff from Tim Cook to hardware chief John Ternus this September, and Cain suggests the current AI inflection resembles the object-oriented shift Jobs rode at NeXT — a moment where the real value sits in a layer most people are not yet looking at.