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Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

225 points by rbanffy 6mo ago

praneetbrar 6mo ago
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.
- jorisw 6mo ago
  Such indeed is the gist of the story that Becoming Steve Jobs tells
ktallett 6mo ago
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.
- zitterbewegung 6mo ago
  NeXT would have died and Mac OS would have been replaced by something .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
  - ktallett 6mo ago
    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. Going to use alternatives like Haiku that can access many modern systems but on such low powered hardware shows what wastage we have.
    - zitterbewegung 6mo ago
      I fail to see how this compares to iOS which runs on phones or even devices with 15 watts of tdp laptops.
  - ghaff 6mo ago
    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.
    - ktallett 6mo ago
      A command line of any form is the biggest positive of Rhapsody and eventually Mac OS X
  - jorisw 6mo ago
    > and Mac OS would have been replaced by something The facts are: The only other contender was BeOS, after Talligent flopped and Copland imploded. But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand. Source: all of the (other) Steve Jobs books
    - rbanffy 6mo ago
      > But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand. Hence becoming Jean-Louis Passé.
    - zitterbewegung 6mo ago
      To put this into more context Apple really needed a modern kernel that for some reason had been tried multiple times and failed . Microsoft succeeded with Windows NT. Practically the acquisition of any company was motivated to just move a GUI with macOS classic like design but modern features like memory protection. I never really understood why Apple had a hard time with this.
      - hylaride 6mo ago
        Microsoft brought in an external OS designer (Dave Cutler) who had experience designing robust kernels that were actually used (most famously VMS). NT also was not required to be an instant switchover, and was "tested" first in niche (and often new) roles as a back-office server OS and NT/win2k corporate desktops for years before the general public was exposed to it via Windows XP. But Microsoft supported windows 3.11/9X/ME for more than a decade after windows NT was first released in 1993. Apple had less resources, especially in the dark 1990s, to support such a move. It was made even worse by the fact that its leadership was probably not even aware of the difficulty in moving over, as well as the fact that 1990s Apple wasn't exactly a place people expected to "change the world?".
      - jorisw 6mo ago
        The original Mac OS was hack on top of hack to make the GUI work on the 1984 hardware. It couldn’t be retroactively modernized the way they wanted.
    - 6mo ago
  - Projectiboga 6mo ago
    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.
  - rjrjrjrj 6mo ago
    > All macOS is is just a different window manager This dramatically undersells what MacOS is and was. It was way beyond just a window manager. From its inception in the 1980s it included a set of APIs that allowed developers to build sophisticated (and consistent) GUI applications with comparatively little effort. eg Quark Xpress, Illustrator, Photoshop, Excel, Word By the end of the classic Mac era in the late 1990s that API set had grown to include a ton of stuff. QuickTime, ColorSync, TrueType, AppleShare, sophisticated printer support, multiple display support, etc
    - pjmlp 6mo ago
      Like any proper desktop OS from the 16 bit days that got their inspiration out of Xerox. It is only on UNIX land that is a mess, the only thing that people have managed to agree on are POSIX, and Khronos APIs.
- cbm-vic-20 6mo ago
  It's enough of an influence that macOS APIs had (or still have) "NS" prefixes to many functions.
dmazin 6mo ago
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. Though it’s essentially a long hit piece. The author really had it out for Jobs. In fact it’s a completely uncharitable book now that I think about it. Hopefully this new book will be a lot less biased.
- jorisw 6mo ago
  Another book that focuses on this period is Becoming Steve Jobs
  - hedgehog0 6mo ago
    I love “Becoming Steve Jobs” much more than the official biography.
    - jorisw 6mo ago
      Same
    - JKCalhoun 6mo ago
      I bailed on the official bio when I got to the part where Jobs is (belatedly) crediting his adoptive father with showing young Steve the importance of (paraphrasing) "giving as much attention to the parts of the product that the customer will never see". It was clear at that point that this would be a Jobs-directed bio and I saw no point in continuing to read that.
      - trvz 6mo ago
        I think it was about the back of a cabinet, and that attitude certainly exists in woodworking. It's reasonable for learning to appreciate that as an adolescent to have a big impact on a person. And even if that book were fully dictated by Steve Jobs, it can still be valuable to know what such a person thinks (or claims to think) about things.
cmiles8 6mo ago
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.
- yardie 6mo ago
  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." 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.
  - jazz9k 6mo ago
    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. Not that different from when Musk took over Twitter.
    - ipython 6mo ago
      It’s not the same at all. The only equivalence is firing people.
    - elzbardico 6mo ago
      If Apple went bankrupt, Everyone would be without a job.
      - Projectiboga 6mo ago
        Not it they simply went Chapter 11 and reorganized.
hi41 6mo ago
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?
- ghaff 6mo ago
  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.
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- SanjayMehta 6mo ago
  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. I still use the first generation Magic Mouse when I have to, and I hate its sharp edges. I don't know anyone who likes it, they usually say they prefer the trackpad.
  - ghaff 6mo ago
    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.) 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. 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.
    - SanjayMehta 6mo ago
      I have a Thinkpad style USB keyboard meant for server racks. Has a trackpad and that little joystick. It's only flaw is it that it's too old for that windows key.
puff_pastry 6mo ago
"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. 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.
WillAdams 6mo ago
Presumably, the book goes into depth about the folks who actually did the work: - Susan Kare and Keith Ohlfs who did the UI design - Caroline Rose (Author of _Inside Macintosh_) who wrote the documentation - 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 - Brad J. Cox (author of https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1945013.Object_Oriented_Programming https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1945013.Object_Orient...) who created Objective-C - Jean-Marie Hullot who created Interface Builder and which made Steve Jobs' "5 Minute Word Processor Demo" possible - 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 - John Anderson and Bill Tschumy who wrote WriteNow, first for the Mac, then porting the ~100,000 lines of assembly to NeXtstep (for a couple of years, MacExpos were SJ showing off things previously shown at NeXTexpos to thunderous applause) 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: - 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.... - 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) - the map builder for a little game called _Doom_ - a full-fledged desktop publishing app by Glenn Reid (author of PostScript Language Design (the Green Book) and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8260463-thinking-in-postscript https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8260463-thinking-in-post...) Pages.app by Pages, Inc. 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). 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). 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....
xxs 6mo ago
Yeah forgotten, except for the OS and ObjectiveC
- Kwpolska 6mo ago
  It's classic IEEE Spectrum, uninspiring slop since before slop was cool.
Geezus_42 6mo ago
Is it really forgotten considering it gets mentioned almost everytime he is?
- klez 6mo ago
  I'm afraid that's just our bubble. If I asked my Mac- and iPad- using parents who Steve Jobs was they'd know it was the Apple guy, but if I asked if they've ever heard of NeXT they wouldn't have the foggiest idea.
  - Geezus_42 6mo ago
    Sure, but they probably didn't know what NeXT was when it existed either. Can't forget something you never knew. Nerds like us remember it, and that's who I would expect to.
elzbardico 6mo ago
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.
- twoodfin 6mo ago
  Probably three times: If they don’t make the Intel transition, I don’t think the Macintosh survives the Tim Cook era. We’d all be using iPads.
felixding 6mo ago
In case you don't know yet, there is a project that tries to bring the NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
- scrumper 6mo ago
  There was WindowMaker for a while too, just a window manager.
- WillAdams 6mo ago
  I wish that all of these sort of efforts would be folded into GNUstep: gnustep.org and that we would arrive at something useful and easily installed and widely accepted.
  - pjmlp 6mo ago
    They don't even support Objective-C latest, as GCC only supports what NeXT was obliged to upstream.
    - avadodin 6mo ago
      I'm pretty sure that's just the runtime. Trivial to support. There is probably some AI slop for it. The main issue is providing an object platform people want to use.
      - pjmlp 6mo ago
        Objective-C 2.0+ also has syntax and semantic updates, besides the whole weak references, and ARC improvements.
- thesuitonym 6mo ago
  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.
wewewedxfgdf 6mo ago
"Forgotten"? Umm no.
stevefan1999 6mo ago
Did people literally forgot that John Carmack's Quake was made on a NeXT workstation...
- dcrazy 6mo ago
  Doom was first. John Romero did an extensive write up: https://web.archive.org/web/20140310124554/http://rome.ro/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday.html https://web.archive.org/web/20140310124554/http://rome.ro/20...
- rjrjrjrj 6mo ago
  Even more significantly, Tim Berners-Lee made the first web browser and server on a NeXT Computer.
  - WillAdams 6mo ago
    Yeah, I meant to work that into my post as the final twist --- his book _Weaving the Web_ was written using one of my favourite tools, NaviPress, a WYSIWYG HTML editor which supported the HTTP Push protocol (AOL later bought them out and made it available as AOLpress) --- really bummed that Amaya has been dropped and that there isn't a nice/free/opensource alternative (that I'm aware of).
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kordlessagain 6mo ago
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mwenge 6mo ago
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- GTP 6mo ago
  I came here to comment on this as well, but from a different angle. Not only is the description inaccurate, but I distinctly remember a fellow HN commenter writing here years ago a very different story. IIRC, they claimed to be in Mac OS X's team. They said that, at the time, Jobs explicitly told them to not use Object Oriented Programming. But, since they knew he wouldn't be able to tell anyway, they still used OOP.
- abanana 6mo ago
  "Wut" indeed! I was only skimming it anyway, but stopped there. I'm sorry, that paragraph is so effed up, I can't take anything else seriously from this author. This is too often the problem with stuff about Steve Jobs. People worship him, and credit him with inventing everything. So, even ignoring how thoroughly mangled that quoted section is in every way, now he's the inventor of OOP. Did he also invent a time machine to take OOP back to the 1960s?
- pram 6mo ago
  FWIW I don’t think they mean “object oriented programming” like Steve knew anything about ObjC, rather the frameworks and APIs of Next/OpenStep/Cocoa and stuff like WebObjects
  - flomo 6mo ago
    Jobs was going around trying to sell this to programmers at wall street banks and etc, so he definitely understood that stuff (beyond the drag-n-drop sense). You can probably find some demos on youtube. Its basically true that there wasn't anything like the Java class library widely available in 1988.
- twoodfin 6mo ago
  The best direct reporting on this comes from Jobs himself in the so-called “lost” interview with Bob Cringely: Jobs: I had 3-4 people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind, and they showed me what they were working on, and they showed me, But I was so blinded by the first one that One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programing. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was, really, a network computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life. https://sameerbajaj.com/jobs/ https://sameerbajaj.com/jobs/ NeXT was, at its core, about getting back to the other two things.
racl101 6mo ago
I'll have to read it. Always wondered how this very influential OS and machine got created.
atleastoptimal 6mo ago
Who is the closest current equivalent to Steve Jobs. Elon?
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keeganpoppen 6mo ago
cannot wait for this book. it is insane that steve jobs has somehow become underrated because the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses”… that is such a painfully reductive narrative it beggars belief. there is a reason he is in/on the pantheon, and to talk yourself out of it is to do yourself a disservice. it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of taste he spent his whole life acquiring. the only transferable skill is in finding the next one (me, obviously, xP), so that we can similarly talk ourselves into how it was obvious and evolutionary and etc. i cannot summon any other product announcements that ANYONE cared about in the way that people in my (nerd) dorm did for steve. you don’t have to put his merits and demerits on a ledger to appreciate his greatness. just take “the good parts” and leave the bad. he is sui generis.
- mathisfun123 6mo ago
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  - alsetmusic 6mo ago
    What a crappy thing to say to someone speaking honestly and passionately . I don’t worship the guy but I sure as hell consider myself lucky to have watched the iPhone announcement live on a webstream. It’s inarguably one of the most important products in human history. It changed all of our lives whether you own one or not. You can argue that someone else would have got there eventually, but Apple did it first and it amazed everyone who used it. And if it didn’t amaze you, I think you’re bitter and cynical. I’m not the person you responded to, but Apple nerds can throw insults too. I think it would have taken many years for other companies to get to the 1.0 version of the iPhone and they would have done it worse. Steve’s incredible demand for “just works” when it came to stuff like that wrangled employees to do what was considered impossible at the time. I was on the team that delivered the first iPad and you wouldn’t believe how excited we were for the announcement as other companies introduced tablets that weren’t anywhere near as good during the months leading up to it. It was a magical thing to be a part of and I think the hardware and software engineers responsible for the first iPhone genuinely accomplished the impossible. Steve Jobs was one the only people who could have steered a company to do what Apple did during his second time there. He resuscitated a dying company and made it the cool brand for young people and a veritable juggernaut. I can’t do that. I doubt you could either.
jazz9k 6mo ago
In Many ways, Jobs was just like Elon Musk. He fired people left and right (check out any documentary about the apple days). Politics rules everything. You can be liberal and literally get away with murder. Gates was hated from 2000 on and loved again when the tech community found out he supported forced vaccinations and climate change.
- badc0ffee 6mo ago
  And now, the thing people are most likely to bring up is him partying with Epstein and attempting to slip Melinda some antibiotics after he got an STD.
Nevermark 6mo ago
> I think they’re still going to make great [software]. It’s just not going to be the cutting-edge anymore. This is what I see. The biggest test was the Vision Pro. Amazing hardware but only "another iOS" software vision for it, which is a tremendous dropped ball. Another toy-app/media kiosk with its service subscription lanyard. To me, the Vision Pro screams out that it wants to have a richer interface than a Mac, with spacial friendly windows, a serious work environment, unfettered by a screen boundary. Ironically, to the point of tragedy, the Vision just allows importing of a Mac screen ... as a larger Mac screen. The Vision screams out for a full spacial development environment, that by being a better place to develop software for any device, Mac or iOS, also pulls developers into creating spacial applications, by default, for themselves as much as anyone else. Again, tragically, Vision Pro development is limited to happening on 2D Mac screens (physical or imported). Xcode, terminal, JIT capable, etc. Finally, if there is an obvious new dimension of AI that has not been tapped yet, relevent to Apple's greatest heritage, it is the combination of AI and spacial to enable entirely new modes of interaction. AI allows 3D content to be created in more efficient ways than ever before. A perfect and novel fit for spacial hardware and software, that natural habitat for 3D. Those are three powerful and related software extensions for computing, that will happen, each within the hardware capabilities of today's Vision Pro. I believe Steve Jobs would have gone all in, to deliver the next big thing in software interfaces, with AI in a supporting role, beyond the Mac in power and capabilities. It would have made the $3500 price tag completely sustainable. Many of us buy MacBook Pro's loaded up well above that price tag. But, along with software innovation, Apple has lost the bicycle for the mind philosophy.
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- not_kurt_godel 6mo ago
  Steve Jobs would have taken one look at the design proposal and said nobody is going to voluntarily strap that fucking thing to their face and scrapped it on the spot.
brcmthrowaway 6mo ago
I find it interesting Steve was never close to being as rich as Elon or even Sam Altman at this point.
mrandish 6mo ago
I think a deeper dive into Job's evolution during the 12 years at Next is an excellent idea. However, I found statements like this concerning: "Apple version one was failure in many ways." In context, 'Apple version one' means Apple 1977 to 1985 (when Jobs left). But the Apple II product line was a huge success for more than a decade. That's a big thing to miss in an article claiming to correct historical misperceptions. It also says "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim. While the Mac wasn't the unit sales leader compared to [all PC brands combined], from 1984 to 1994 it beat PCs on revenue, margin and mind share.
- jjtheblunt 6mo ago
  It's also just absurd that they assert NeXT is largely forgotten, while writing for an audience very likely to include people fully aware of NeXT.
  - pjmlp 6mo ago
    My graduation thesis was porting a visualisation framework from Objective-C/NeXTSTEP into C++/Windows 95, because my supervisor wanted a way out for his research. His cube was collecting dust on the office corner. This is how much hope people had on NeXT before the Apple deal came to be.
    - jjtheblunt 6mo ago
      I wrote my thesis on a NeXT with latex2e , in my case about adding explicit parallelism constructs to SetL and dynamically load balancing shared memory multiprocessing to the associated runtime. There's evidently two of us!
- flomo 6mo ago
  > "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim Macintosh was in fact not successful for many years, and Apple survived by chanting "Apple II Forever!" at their legacy edu market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50 Also the fail Apple III was Jobs' machine. Scully and Gasse made the Macintosh II line successful by marketing expensive workstations to creative professionals. That was against Jobs' "vision" so of course he discounts it. One thing which has never changed: Apple won't lift their finger unless they get a 30% margin.
lolive 6mo ago
Next and General Magic are the foundations of our modern days. Both stories are absolutely legendary !
mentos 6mo ago
Did smart phones ruin society?
- andrekandre 6mo ago
  more like social media (but isn't this a bit off topic?)
  - mentos 6mo ago
    Smart phones are what made social media toxic. The last sacred mile of our social lives has been invaded and corrupted no? No one enjoys a concert or sunset without feeling the need to capture and share it. Who is to blame for that? Steve Jobs
    - andrekandre 6mo ago
      > Smart phones are what made social media toxic. i dont know about that... usenet was a toxic mess alot of the time waaaay back, and facebook used on pc alot of the time is a total cesspool, same with 4chan etc etc... smartphones just made it more accessible, but it was always there...
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      - mentos 6mo ago
        I appreciate what you're saying but is the problem with fast food that people have always been hungry?
        andrekandre 6mo ago
        probably the problem with fastfood is that its preying on our human bias for fats and salts and doesn't provide much beyond that we probably arent super disagreeing anyways, all im saying is its kind of like blaming uber eats for delivering lots of junk food to everyone when the problem is the junk food in other words, probably we should think about why we allow these social media companies to prey on our human biases. hypothetical, but would you still be against smartphones if facebook or 4chan etc didn't exist or was illegal as a business? if so, whats the reason?
alsetmusic 6mo ago
What an amazing idea to focus solely on this time period in his life. Just ordered my copy.
georgeecollins 6mo ago
When I was younger I read the book "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing". It was a book about Steve Jobs and NeXT, written before Apple bought Next but far enough along that it was clear that NeXT wasn't going to work out. It's a really interesting book because it was essentially saying that Steve Jobs was a terrible manager and NeXT was a disaster. I don't think it was wrong either. NeXT was a disaster for its investors. The lessons I take from that story are: You can do a hundred things wrong and one thing right and the one thing may save you. Most everything NeXT did failed but they created OSX. No one is a perfect genius, everybody makes mistakes, and the most effective people learn from their setbacks.
chanki 6mo ago
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225 points by rbanffy 6mo ago

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.

jorisw 6mo ago
Such indeed is the gist of the story that Becoming Steve Jobs tells

ktallett 6mo ago

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.

zitterbewegung 6mo ago
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
- ktallett 6mo ago
  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. Going to use alternatives like Haiku that can access many modern systems but on such low powered hardware shows what wastage we have.
  - zitterbewegung 6mo ago
    I fail to see how this compares to iOS which runs on phones or even devices with 15 watts of tdp laptops.
- ghaff 6mo ago
  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.
  - ktallett 6mo ago
    A command line of any form is the biggest positive of Rhapsody and eventually Mac OS X
- jorisw 6mo ago
  > and Mac OS would have been replaced by something The facts are: The only other contender was BeOS, after Talligent flopped and Copland imploded. But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand. Source: all of the (other) Steve Jobs books
  - rbanffy 6mo ago
    > But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand. Hence becoming Jean-Louis Passé.
  - zitterbewegung 6mo ago
    To put this into more context Apple really needed a modern kernel that for some reason had been tried multiple times and failed . Microsoft succeeded with Windows NT. Practically the acquisition of any company was motivated to just move a GUI with macOS classic like design but modern features like memory protection. I never really understood why Apple had a hard time with this.
    - hylaride 6mo ago
      Microsoft brought in an external OS designer (Dave Cutler) who had experience designing robust kernels that were actually used (most famously VMS). NT also was not required to be an instant switchover, and was "tested" first in niche (and often new) roles as a back-office server OS and NT/win2k corporate desktops for years before the general public was exposed to it via Windows XP. But Microsoft supported windows 3.11/9X/ME for more than a decade after windows NT was first released in 1993. Apple had less resources, especially in the dark 1990s, to support such a move. It was made even worse by the fact that its leadership was probably not even aware of the difficulty in moving over, as well as the fact that 1990s Apple wasn't exactly a place people expected to "change the world?".
    - jorisw 6mo ago
      The original Mac OS was hack on top of hack to make the GUI work on the 1984 hardware. It couldn’t be retroactively modernized the way they wanted.
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- Projectiboga 6mo ago
  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.
- rjrjrjrj 6mo ago
  > All macOS is is just a different window manager This dramatically undersells what MacOS is and was. It was way beyond just a window manager. From its inception in the 1980s it included a set of APIs that allowed developers to build sophisticated (and consistent) GUI applications with comparatively little effort. eg Quark Xpress, Illustrator, Photoshop, Excel, Word By the end of the classic Mac era in the late 1990s that API set had grown to include a ton of stuff. QuickTime, ColorSync, TrueType, AppleShare, sophisticated printer support, multiple display support, etc
  - pjmlp 6mo ago
    Like any proper desktop OS from the 16 bit days that got their inspiration out of Xerox. It is only on UNIX land that is a mess, the only thing that people have managed to agree on are POSIX, and Khronos APIs.
cbm-vic-20 6mo ago
It's enough of an influence that macOS APIs had (or still have) "NS" prefixes to many functions.

dmazin 6mo ago

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. Though it’s essentially a long hit piece. The author really had it out for Jobs. In fact it’s a completely uncharitable book now that I think about it. Hopefully this new book will be a lot less biased.

jorisw 6mo ago
Another book that focuses on this period is Becoming Steve Jobs
- hedgehog0 6mo ago
  I love “Becoming Steve Jobs” much more than the official biography.
  - jorisw 6mo ago
    Same
  - JKCalhoun 6mo ago
    I bailed on the official bio when I got to the part where Jobs is (belatedly) crediting his adoptive father with showing young Steve the importance of (paraphrasing) "giving as much attention to the parts of the product that the customer will never see". It was clear at that point that this would be a Jobs-directed bio and I saw no point in continuing to read that.
    - trvz 6mo ago
      I think it was about the back of a cabinet, and that attitude certainly exists in woodworking. It's reasonable for learning to appreciate that as an adolescent to have a big impact on a person. And even if that book were fully dictated by Steve Jobs, it can still be valuable to know what such a person thinks (or claims to think) about things.

cmiles8 6mo ago

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.

yardie 6mo ago
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." 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.
- jazz9k 6mo ago
  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. Not that different from when Musk took over Twitter.
  - ipython 6mo ago
    It’s not the same at all. The only equivalence is firing people.
  - elzbardico 6mo ago
    If Apple went bankrupt, Everyone would be without a job.
    - Projectiboga 6mo ago
      Not it they simply went Chapter 11 and reorganized.

hi41 6mo ago

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?

ghaff 6mo ago
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.
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SanjayMehta 6mo ago
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. I still use the first generation Magic Mouse when I have to, and I hate its sharp edges. I don't know anyone who likes it, they usually say they prefer the trackpad.
- ghaff 6mo ago
  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.) 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. 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.
  - SanjayMehta 6mo ago
    I have a Thinkpad style USB keyboard meant for server racks. Has a trackpad and that little joystick. It's only flaw is it that it's too old for that windows key.

puff_pastry 6mo ago

"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. 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.

WillAdams 6mo ago

Presumably, the book goes into depth about the folks who actually did the work: - Susan Kare and Keith Ohlfs who did the UI design - Caroline Rose (Author of _Inside Macintosh_) who wrote the documentation - 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 - Brad J. Cox (author of https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1945013.Object_Oriented_Programming https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1945013.Object_Orient...) who created Objective-C - Jean-Marie Hullot who created Interface Builder and which made Steve Jobs' "5 Minute Word Processor Demo" possible - 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 - John Anderson and Bill Tschumy who wrote WriteNow, first for the Mac, then porting the ~100,000 lines of assembly to NeXtstep (for a couple of years, MacExpos were SJ showing off things previously shown at NeXTexpos to thunderous applause) 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: - 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.... - 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) - the map builder for a little game called _Doom_ - a full-fledged desktop publishing app by Glenn Reid (author of PostScript Language Design (the Green Book) and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8260463-thinking-in-postscript https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8260463-thinking-in-post...) Pages.app by Pages, Inc. 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). 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). 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....

xxs 6mo ago

Yeah forgotten, except for the OS and ObjectiveC

Kwpolska 6mo ago
It's classic IEEE Spectrum, uninspiring slop since before slop was cool.

Geezus_42 6mo ago

Is it really forgotten considering it gets mentioned almost everytime he is?

klez 6mo ago
I'm afraid that's just our bubble. If I asked my Mac- and iPad- using parents who Steve Jobs was they'd know it was the Apple guy, but if I asked if they've ever heard of NeXT they wouldn't have the foggiest idea.
- Geezus_42 6mo ago
  Sure, but they probably didn't know what NeXT was when it existed either. Can't forget something you never knew. Nerds like us remember it, and that's who I would expect to.

elzbardico 6mo ago

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.

twoodfin 6mo ago
Probably three times: If they don’t make the Intel transition, I don’t think the Macintosh survives the Tim Cook era. We’d all be using iPads.

felixding 6mo ago

In case you don't know yet, there is a project that tries to bring the NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

scrumper 6mo ago
There was WindowMaker for a while too, just a window manager.
WillAdams 6mo ago
I wish that all of these sort of efforts would be folded into GNUstep: gnustep.org and that we would arrive at something useful and easily installed and widely accepted.
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  They don't even support Objective-C latest, as GCC only supports what NeXT was obliged to upstream.
  - avadodin 6mo ago
    I'm pretty sure that's just the runtime. Trivial to support. There is probably some AI slop for it. The main issue is providing an object platform people want to use.
    - pjmlp 6mo ago
      Objective-C 2.0+ also has syntax and semantic updates, besides the whole weak references, and ARC improvements.
thesuitonym 6mo ago
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.

wewewedxfgdf 6mo ago

"Forgotten"? Umm no.

stevefan1999 6mo ago

Did people literally forgot that John Carmack's Quake was made on a NeXT workstation...

dcrazy 6mo ago
Doom was first. John Romero did an extensive write up: https://web.archive.org/web/20140310124554/http://rome.ro/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday.html https://web.archive.org/web/20140310124554/http://rome.ro/20...
rjrjrjrj 6mo ago
Even more significantly, Tim Berners-Lee made the first web browser and server on a NeXT Computer.
- WillAdams 6mo ago
  Yeah, I meant to work that into my post as the final twist --- his book _Weaving the Web_ was written using one of my favourite tools, NaviPress, a WYSIWYG HTML editor which supported the HTTP Push protocol (AOL later bought them out and made it available as AOLpress) --- really bummed that Amaya has been dropped and that there isn't a nice/free/opensource alternative (that I'm aware of).
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kordlessagain 6mo ago

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mwenge 6mo ago

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GTP 6mo ago
I came here to comment on this as well, but from a different angle. Not only is the description inaccurate, but I distinctly remember a fellow HN commenter writing here years ago a very different story. IIRC, they claimed to be in Mac OS X's team. They said that, at the time, Jobs explicitly told them to not use Object Oriented Programming. But, since they knew he wouldn't be able to tell anyway, they still used OOP.
abanana 6mo ago
"Wut" indeed! I was only skimming it anyway, but stopped there. I'm sorry, that paragraph is so effed up, I can't take anything else seriously from this author. This is too often the problem with stuff about Steve Jobs. People worship him, and credit him with inventing everything. So, even ignoring how thoroughly mangled that quoted section is in every way, now he's the inventor of OOP. Did he also invent a time machine to take OOP back to the 1960s?
pram 6mo ago
FWIW I don’t think they mean “object oriented programming” like Steve knew anything about ObjC, rather the frameworks and APIs of Next/OpenStep/Cocoa and stuff like WebObjects
- flomo 6mo ago
  Jobs was going around trying to sell this to programmers at wall street banks and etc, so he definitely understood that stuff (beyond the drag-n-drop sense). You can probably find some demos on youtube. Its basically true that there wasn't anything like the Java class library widely available in 1988.
twoodfin 6mo ago
The best direct reporting on this comes from Jobs himself in the so-called “lost” interview with Bob Cringely: Jobs: I had 3-4 people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind, and they showed me what they were working on, and they showed me, But I was so blinded by the first one that One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programing. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was, really, a network computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life. https://sameerbajaj.com/jobs/ https://sameerbajaj.com/jobs/ NeXT was, at its core, about getting back to the other two things.

racl101 6mo ago

I'll have to read it. Always wondered how this very influential OS and machine got created.

atleastoptimal 6mo ago

Who is the closest current equivalent to Steve Jobs. Elon?

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keeganpoppen 6mo ago

cannot wait for this book. it is insane that steve jobs has somehow become underrated because the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses”… that is such a painfully reductive narrative it beggars belief. there is a reason he is in/on the pantheon, and to talk yourself out of it is to do yourself a disservice. it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of taste he spent his whole life acquiring. the only transferable skill is in finding the next one (me, obviously, xP), so that we can similarly talk ourselves into how it was obvious and evolutionary and etc. i cannot summon any other product announcements that ANYONE cared about in the way that people in my (nerd) dorm did for steve. you don’t have to put his merits and demerits on a ledger to appreciate his greatness. just take “the good parts” and leave the bad. he is sui generis.

mathisfun123 6mo ago
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- alsetmusic 6mo ago
  What a crappy thing to say to someone speaking honestly and passionately . I don’t worship the guy but I sure as hell consider myself lucky to have watched the iPhone announcement live on a webstream. It’s inarguably one of the most important products in human history. It changed all of our lives whether you own one or not. You can argue that someone else would have got there eventually, but Apple did it first and it amazed everyone who used it. And if it didn’t amaze you, I think you’re bitter and cynical. I’m not the person you responded to, but Apple nerds can throw insults too. I think it would have taken many years for other companies to get to the 1.0 version of the iPhone and they would have done it worse. Steve’s incredible demand for “just works” when it came to stuff like that wrangled employees to do what was considered impossible at the time. I was on the team that delivered the first iPad and you wouldn’t believe how excited we were for the announcement as other companies introduced tablets that weren’t anywhere near as good during the months leading up to it. It was a magical thing to be a part of and I think the hardware and software engineers responsible for the first iPhone genuinely accomplished the impossible. Steve Jobs was one the only people who could have steered a company to do what Apple did during his second time there. He resuscitated a dying company and made it the cool brand for young people and a veritable juggernaut. I can’t do that. I doubt you could either.

jazz9k 6mo ago

In Many ways, Jobs was just like Elon Musk. He fired people left and right (check out any documentary about the apple days). Politics rules everything. You can be liberal and literally get away with murder. Gates was hated from 2000 on and loved again when the tech community found out he supported forced vaccinations and climate change.

badc0ffee 6mo ago
And now, the thing people are most likely to bring up is him partying with Epstein and attempting to slip Melinda some antibiotics after he got an STD.

Nevermark 6mo ago

> I think they’re still going to make great [software]. It’s just not going to be the cutting-edge anymore. This is what I see. The biggest test was the Vision Pro. Amazing hardware but only "another iOS" software vision for it, which is a tremendous dropped ball. Another toy-app/media kiosk with its service subscription lanyard. To me, the Vision Pro screams out that it wants to have a richer interface than a Mac, with spacial friendly windows, a serious work environment, unfettered by a screen boundary. Ironically, to the point of tragedy, the Vision just allows importing of a Mac screen ... as a larger Mac screen. The Vision screams out for a full spacial development environment, that by being a better place to develop software for any device, Mac or iOS, also pulls developers into creating spacial applications, by default, for themselves as much as anyone else. Again, tragically, Vision Pro development is limited to happening on 2D Mac screens (physical or imported). Xcode, terminal, JIT capable, etc. Finally, if there is an obvious new dimension of AI that has not been tapped yet, relevent to Apple's greatest heritage, it is the combination of AI and spacial to enable entirely new modes of interaction. AI allows 3D content to be created in more efficient ways than ever before. A perfect and novel fit for spacial hardware and software, that natural habitat for 3D. Those are three powerful and related software extensions for computing, that will happen, each within the hardware capabilities of today's Vision Pro. I believe Steve Jobs would have gone all in, to deliver the next big thing in software interfaces, with AI in a supporting role, beyond the Mac in power and capabilities. It would have made the $3500 price tag completely sustainable. Many of us buy MacBook Pro's loaded up well above that price tag. But, along with software innovation, Apple has lost the bicycle for the mind philosophy.

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not_kurt_godel 6mo ago
Steve Jobs would have taken one look at the design proposal and said nobody is going to voluntarily strap that fucking thing to their face and scrapped it on the spot.

brcmthrowaway 6mo ago

I find it interesting Steve was never close to being as rich as Elon or even Sam Altman at this point.

mrandish 6mo ago

I think a deeper dive into Job's evolution during the 12 years at Next is an excellent idea. However, I found statements like this concerning: "Apple version one was failure in many ways." In context, 'Apple version one' means Apple 1977 to 1985 (when Jobs left). But the Apple II product line was a huge success for more than a decade. That's a big thing to miss in an article claiming to correct historical misperceptions. It also says "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim. While the Mac wasn't the unit sales leader compared to [all PC brands combined], from 1984 to 1994 it beat PCs on revenue, margin and mind share.

jjtheblunt 6mo ago
It's also just absurd that they assert NeXT is largely forgotten, while writing for an audience very likely to include people fully aware of NeXT.
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  My graduation thesis was porting a visualisation framework from Objective-C/NeXTSTEP into C++/Windows 95, because my supervisor wanted a way out for his research. His cube was collecting dust on the office corner. This is how much hope people had on NeXT before the Apple deal came to be.
  - jjtheblunt 6mo ago
    I wrote my thesis on a NeXT with latex2e , in my case about adding explicit parallelism constructs to SetL and dynamically load balancing shared memory multiprocessing to the associated runtime. There's evidently two of us!
flomo 6mo ago
> "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim Macintosh was in fact not successful for many years, and Apple survived by chanting "Apple II Forever!" at their legacy edu market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50 Also the fail Apple III was Jobs' machine. Scully and Gasse made the Macintosh II line successful by marketing expensive workstations to creative professionals. That was against Jobs' "vision" so of course he discounts it. One thing which has never changed: Apple won't lift their finger unless they get a 30% margin.

lolive 6mo ago

Next and General Magic are the foundations of our modern days. Both stories are absolutely legendary !

mentos 6mo ago

Did smart phones ruin society?

andrekandre 6mo ago
more like social media (but isn't this a bit off topic?)
- mentos 6mo ago
  Smart phones are what made social media toxic. The last sacred mile of our social lives has been invaded and corrupted no? No one enjoys a concert or sunset without feeling the need to capture and share it. Who is to blame for that? Steve Jobs
  - andrekandre 6mo ago
    > Smart phones are what made social media toxic. i dont know about that... usenet was a toxic mess alot of the time waaaay back, and facebook used on pc alot of the time is a total cesspool, same with 4chan etc etc... smartphones just made it more accessible, but it was always there...
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    - mentos 6mo ago
      I appreciate what you're saying but is the problem with fast food that people have always been hungry?
      - andrekandre 6mo ago
        probably the problem with fastfood is that its preying on our human bias for fats and salts and doesn't provide much beyond that we probably arent super disagreeing anyways, all im saying is its kind of like blaming uber eats for delivering lots of junk food to everyone when the problem is the junk food in other words, probably we should think about why we allow these social media companies to prey on our human biases. hypothetical, but would you still be against smartphones if facebook or 4chan etc didn't exist or was illegal as a business? if so, whats the reason?

alsetmusic 6mo ago

What an amazing idea to focus solely on this time period in his life. Just ordered my copy.

georgeecollins 6mo ago

When I was younger I read the book "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing". It was a book about Steve Jobs and NeXT, written before Apple bought Next but far enough along that it was clear that NeXT wasn't going to work out. It's a really interesting book because it was essentially saying that Steve Jobs was a terrible manager and NeXT was a disaster. I don't think it was wrong either. NeXT was a disaster for its investors. The lessons I take from that story are: You can do a hundred things wrong and one thing right and the one thing may save you. Most everything NeXT did failed but they created OSX. No one is a perfect genius, everybody makes mistakes, and the most effective people learn from their setbacks.

chanki 6mo ago

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