If you want more on this, I recommend Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing by Stross. I’m not sure, but it might be the only extensive book about Next other than this new one.<p>Though it’s essentially a long hit piece. The author really had it out for Jobs.<p>In fact it’s a completely uncharitable book now that I think about it. Hopefully this new book will be a lot less biased.
While maybe biased, also shows a bit about the real Steve Jobs without the distortion field, and why Apple hardware costs what it costs, even when the delivery isn't up to the premium price.
>>the real Steve Jobs without the distortion field<p>A lot of things come in full package, same person putting in the same effort(if not better) in a different place/situation doesn't give the same results.<p>I once worked with a senior engineer/leader at a electronics company who delivered great products/results and ran the shop to literal perfection for like a decade. The company got sold, and he moved on. He was just not able to replicate the same success after that ever, despite by his own admission he tried even harder else where.<p>Despite the fact that Jobs was like the greatest ever, Im sure without Apple, its culture and overall company inertia he wouldn't be able to do much either.<p>This is also why if you have some kind of a winning combination you are better off sticking with it even if its not entirely perfect. Anything else could be way worse.
Jobs really did make a lot of boneheaded decisions when running NeXT; this book just calls him out on it.
Nifty book by Rob Blessin and his son Luciano, _Inside NeXT_ which is worth looking up:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJvxze8gZq8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJvxze8gZq8</a>
Why did the author have it out for him?<p>Jobs' life story makes me reflect on the choices we make in life. My impression is that yeah he changed the world, but he was really embattled with himself and the world, and he made a lot of enemies, partly because he stood on his principles and beliefs, come what may, but I'm sure there's more to the story
One can see a little bit about this in the stories from Folklore.org, e.g.,<p><a href="https://www.folklore.org/Tell_Adam_Hes_An_Asshole.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.folklore.org/Tell_Adam_Hes_An_Asshole.html</a>
I've seen variations of this line so often from incumbents<p><pre><code> "Oh, some Apple folks", he addressed us in a condescending tone"
</code></pre>
I remember reading an account about NVIDIA from its Riva-128 days very early on where the incumbent 3DFX (later acquired by NVIDIA) came over to their booth with a condescending tone, and the Riva made 3DFX's flagship product look like a toy<p>It's always the damn condescension, it seems to trigger greek tragedy endings and honestly world changing products -- the Mac, the GPU, it's always some asshole disrespecting an underdog to the point of rage
Another book that focuses on this period is Becoming Steve Jobs
I love “Becoming Steve Jobs” much more than the official biography.
Yeah, that's definitely my favorite book about Apple/Steve Jobs.
In many ways modern Apple is largely Next. The Apple that was dying when he returned largely faded away. Folks forget that Apple was literally days away from simply going bust. One of the most amazing comeback stories in the history of business.
Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then. They just had very bad supply chain management. A bunch of old Macs sitting in warehouses not selling and too many people on payroll without any clear objectives. As Steve put it, "the ship was sinking and Gil (D'Amelio) was worried about which direction we were pointing."<p>The Apple board had hired a series of presidents who, in the short term, were good for the stock, but bad for the company strategically. The one good thing they did was hire a guy who didn't give a shit about any of that, tore up the old products and wanted a clean start. Thus, the iMac and iBook was born.
I bet if they had went the BeOS route instead, wouldn't be talking about Apple today.
It's funny how many people Jobs had to fire during this period, but is still seen as a good guy to many in the tech community.<p>Not that different from when Musk took over Twitter.
It’s not the same at all. The only equivalence is firing people.
I must have missed the bit where Steve Jobs was trying to create “legion” of his offspring, supported far-right parties in Europe and tried to foment civil war in the UK.<p>Guess I’ll have to buy the book
Another difference worth pointing, Jobs wasn't seen as a pedo or nazi. And we haven't seen him begging already convicted Epstein to go to his island to enjoy the wildest parties. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/28/elon-musk-jeffrey-epstein-files/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/28/elon-mu...</a>
If Apple went bankrupt, Everyone would be without a job.
Apple was NeXT but not anymore. All the NeXT people were pushed out. Turns out, most of the work was being done by the NeXT people. Probably when Scott Forstall gets stabbed in the back by Tim Cook, that was the end of the NeXT era of Apple.
True but people also forget Microsoft invested a lot of $ into Apple to keep it going. M/S did that so they could point to Apple as a competitor during their anti-trust trials.<p>That investment gave Jobs time to turn Apple around, otherwise it would be gone.
In case you don't know yet, there is a project that tries to bring the NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux:<p><a href="https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace</a>
Interesting, this seems to have been around for quite a while, though not as long as AfterStep and Window Maker. I wonder why the author decided to write their own version instead of helping out with one of those projects.
I wish that all of these sort of efforts would be folded into GNUstep:<p>gnustep.org<p>and that we would arrive at something useful and easily installed and widely accepted.
There was WindowMaker for a while too, just a window manager.
I consider that Steve Jobs saved the macintosh as a commercial product twice, not only at his second coming, but also when he overrode Jef Raskins ideas in the first iteraction.
Much respect to Steve and the engineers at Apple. However, I hate using a product from Apple that actually causes me physical pain after using it. The magic mouse. I use that for 10 minutes and my palm and wrist hurt badly. Many have experienced the same symptoms and yet Apple hasn’t changed its design. I get that Apple is creative. Do they change their product design based on feedback from actual users in their creative process?
I’m so confused. Your complaint is that Apple don’t make a mouse that you like?<p>Are you in some situation where you are being forced to use a Magic Mouse?<p>Other manufacturers make mice in every form factor you can imagine. I don’t believe any apple product comes with a Magic Mouse bundled - you’re not <i>forced</i> in any way to buy one.<p>Apple don’t make any headphones that I like. I don’t feel like this is a <i>failing</i> on Apple’s part?
I have an older magic mouse that I replaced with a Logitech one. I won't say the Apple one caused me pain after ten minutes but I really didn't like the design after using it for a while. Much more comfortable.
The Mighty Mouse (the one with the little trackball on the top) was so much better except for the weekly cleaning required. My last one died a few months ago.<p>I still use the first generation Magic Mouse when I have to, and I hate its sharp edges.<p>I don't know anyone who likes it, they usually say they prefer the trackpad.
It helps that non-Windows trackpads were the first ones I could really use. (Deliberate phraseology; trackpads on Thinkpads running Linux worked pretty well for me too.)<p>Interestingly, seem to work better on Windows these days as I've discovered inadvertently. Bought a cheap used/surplus Thinkpad to install Linux and discovered it came pre-installed with Windows 11 and it actually works well.<p>Depends what I'm doing. I'm very happy just using a trackpad day to day but there are some things like photo editing where I prefer a mouse.
"Becoming Steve Jobs" had a great part about NeXT and how Steve Jobs grew there to bounce back once he was back at Apple. This looks promising.<p>I think it's very interesting to read about how his personality grew and how he became a better manager and visionary at his time between CEO-ships.
Is it really forgotten considering it gets mentioned almost everytime he is?
Presumably, the book goes into depth about the folks who actually did the work:<p>- Susan Kare and Keith Ohlfs who did the UI design<p>- Caroline Rose (Author of _Inside Macintosh_) who wrote the documentation<p>- Avie Tevanian (the most heavily recruited CS student at that time w/ job offers from Apple, AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft) who wrote the Mach Micro kernel<p>- Brad J. Cox (author of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1945013.Object_Oriented_Programming" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1945013.Object_Orient...</a>) who created Objective-C<p>- Jean-Marie Hullot who created Interface Builder and which made Steve Jobs' "5 Minute Word Processor Demo" possible<p>- Mike Paquette who wrote Display PostScript (and then, repeated that by writing Quartz, née Display PDF after the Apple bought NeXT) --- his posts to Usenet:comp.sys.next.* are a hoot and well worth looking up<p>- John Anderson and Bill Tschumy who wrote WriteNow, first for the Mac, then porting the ~100,000 lines of assembly to NeXtstep<p>(for a couple of years, MacExpos were SJ showing off things previously shown at NeXTexpos to thunderous applause)<p>That NeXTstep included a number of major advances/breakthroughs (7) was noted in the advertising at the time, suggesting that the reader of the ad could then create the balance for a total of 10 --- some of my favourite apps:<p>- Lotus Improv --- Lotus didn't dare kill of Lotus 1-2-3, so they wrote a new program, which had SJ sending them bouquets of flowers --- a recurring theme in _NeXTWorld Magazine_ was a list of applications which were wanted, and when developed were described as "in the bag" --- really wish I could justify Quantrix at work, or that someone would update the code for Flexisheet so that it would compile....<p>- Altsys Virtuoso --- v1 was created by the team behind Freehand v1--3, and v2 of AV was ported to Mac OS and Windows as Macromedia FreeHand 4 (a .vrt file could be opened by FH4 by changing the file extension of the .vrt file in the document bundle to .fh4)<p>- the map builder for a little game called _Doom_<p>- a full-fledged desktop publishing app by Glenn Reid (author of PostScript Language Design (the Green Book) and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8260463-thinking-in-postscript" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8260463-thinking-in-post...</a>) Pages.app by Pages, Inc.<p>Other ports were notable, but more prosaic w/ WordPerfect being notable for taking full advantage of Display PostScript and Services and being done in just 6 weeks time (easily done since they started w/ a working Unix version).<p>It is notable that for a long while, WebObjects was basically keeping the company alive, with major vendors including the USPS and Dell (that latter was a major embarrassment to MS, and their efforts to change Dell over did _not go well and garnered some notable press).<p>Sad my Cube no longer boots, it w/ a connected Wacom ArtZ, paired w/ an NCR-3125 (since donated to the Smithsonian) running Go Corp. PenPoint (and later an Apple Newton MessagePad 110) represent the high-water mark of my GUI experience and got me through college --- these days I use a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, and a MacBook w/ Wacom One, but I still run Freehand/MX....
- Steve Naroff who basically hacked together Objective-C++ in a few weekends. His interview with the Computer History Museum is worth a watch.
Weird to state all these details, leading with 'presumably'
I don't have the book, and I don't have much faith in writers, esp. when writing about NeXT, e.g., David Pogue writing in his column in _MacWorld_ and noting that Steve Jobs used a ThinkPad (correct) running Windows 95 (incorrect) since he couldn't be bothered to check that the ThinkPad model in question (I believe a 760C) was of course on the NeXTstep Intel compatibility list, and so, was of course running NeXTstep --- Lighthouse Design's Presentation.app was used as the model for Apple's Keynote.app
Wasn't PowerPoint also based on an application initially made for NeXT?
Will concede that David Pogue is a bit of a hack compared to the other biographers. I didn't think his recent book added much except for some stories from the Tim Cook era.
They are hardly forgotten considering the OS was a key influence of Mac OS X and you can see clear features of it today. It was hugely important in the mid 90's graphics and 3d animation era too. Such a fabulous piece of design, both software and hardware.
I would much have prefered a world where Next and Mac OS never combined and we had both, as the Mac O7-9 were also a real treat to use.
NeXT would have died and Mac OS would have been replaced by something . All macOS is is just a different window manager (to borrow a Unix term). Windows and Linux probably be more dominant . macOS is a better system than classic macOS when you realize you still have access to the NeXT internals and even many applications in utilities are really GUIs on top of command line utilities and you can roll back many features by running a command that edits a XML file that really is just a large dictionary to remove or modify features
> and Mac OS would have been replaced by something<p>The facts are: The only other contender was BeOS, after Talligent flopped and Copland imploded.<p>But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand.<p>Source: all of the (other) Steve Jobs books
Yes, and although most users don't care (directly), having essentially a BSD command line available on Mac OS is pretty useful for a lot of us.
Do you realize Steve's other successful business used NeXT and then OpenStep? That little venture, Pixar, is where the cash to save Apple came from.
Mac OS was a step in a different direction, however development was far less compelling for OSX than classic. Think C was far more enjoyable and created far smaller and less power hungry apps, which allowed for a greater range of possibilities on low powered chips.<p>Going to use alternatives like Haiku that can access many modern systems but on such low powered hardware shows what wastage we have.
It's enough of an influence that macOS APIs had (or still have) "NS" prefixes to many functions.
Yeah forgotten, except for the OS and ObjectiveC
"Forgotten"?<p>Umm no.
One thing that often gets overlooked is how much failure and constraint shape better leadership. It seems like the NeXT years gave Jobs the space to rethink product focus in a way that likely wouldn’t have happened if Apple had kept succeeding uninterrupted.