It seems clear (not an expert) that Jobs wasn't fired because the Mac was unpopular at Apple. It seems the main thing that got him fired was, roughly, an intern

It seems clear (not an expert) that Jobs wasn't fired because the Mac was unpopular at Apple. It seems the main thing that got him fired was, roughly, an internal conflict about what the next step after Macintosh should be: the Macintosh II Apple actually shipped, or something like the NeXT https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-precursor-mac-ii-next-cube/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-prec... . (The Macintosh IIs were very expensive, easily in the same ballpark as a NeXT Cube system, and very profitable for Apple.) There was certainly also personal ill-will between Jobs and Scully and maybe some other senior people, and likely also a lack of trust in his project management. But yes, all this probably had relatively little to do with his behaviour towards subordinates. It may in fact be the case that Jobs' became more caustic towards subordinates at NeXT than he had usually been in his first time at Apple.