Steve Jobs in Exile
I’m not a Steve Jobs fanboy.
Yes, I loved OSX in its early days. Yes, I rocked a PowerBook my first 3 years of college. Yes, I loved my iPods, my iPads, and my iPhones. The man cast a notable shadow into the technical world we inhabit today.
But I don’t idolize the man. He had few, if any, true friends. He made horrible choices about parenting and how to spend his time. He was mercurial and cruel. I don’t idolize that. But I do care very much about the engineering that happened under his leadership.
- Not Steve’s Apple, but Woz’s lovingly hand-wrapped wiring on the first Apple board
- Not Steve’s Macintosh, but the painting, the icons, and later the HyperCard-bearing Macintosh of Bill Atkinson
- Not Steve’s NeXT, but Avie Tevanian’s Mach microkernel and OOP-rooted primitives for building and scaling complex software
In short, I want to hear more about the engineering decisions, the financial trade-offs, the arguments, the insights, the gem of an idea at a research park or university that was bought and became the basis for the products we love.
Unfortunately, Cain’s book doesn’t deliver that. What it does deliver however is a very good plug to the NeXT-era lacuna in Walter Isaacson’s book (which Isaacson failed to cover in adequate length). And I thoroughly agree with Cain: you can’t understand Jobs’ return to Apple without understanding his NeXT fallow period. To my mind, the fact that Isaacson gave such short shrift to the topic suggests that he was bored of the journalism task of Jobs’ biography and was getting swept up in his subject’s own reality distortion field (or, uncharitably, it was the beginning of his falling in love with his subjects and confusing access journalism for journalism).
Regardless, what I want, what I really, really want is the engineering biography of the NeXT workstation and the NeXTSTEP OS. Having read this book, I shall continue to wait. However, if you’re interested in what Steve was like as he left Apple (cruel and profligate and immune to negative feedback), this book is for you. If you’re looking for how to abuse the spirit of non-competes, here’s a guide. And if you’re wondering how the Mac became the premiere development platform for the last 20 years among (self-identified) cool developers (“Unix weenies by Armani”), this is a great start.
2026 08 22 I Miss the Different Regional Cultures of America
As a toddler, growing up between Louisiana and Houston, I remember listening to the radio with my parents, and the announcers would tell me one critical fact about each band: where they were from. I remember learning, later, on MTV, that Journey was from San Francisco. And in the street garages of the Sunset, the docks and warehouses of South of Market and Mission Creek, in whatever it was that made them look tough despite the fact that Steve Perry had the voice of an angel, that told me something about San Francisco.
Likewise, growing up in Houston, it mattered to me that ZZ Top were Texas heroes. They were like me. They were like us.