Steve Jobs. The Exile

That’s the door, Mr Jobs! April 1985. Steve Jobs walks out of the Cupertino headquarters, ousted from the company he himself founded. He would spend the next twelve years, until 1996, in entrepreneurial limbo launching NeXT, a new, visionary venture that never quite managed to capture the imagination of the emerging digital public: failures, bankruptcies, humiliations. This was Jobs’s ‘lost decade’, skilfully reconstructed by Geoffrey Cain, an investigative journalist who has previously written books on Samsung and Chinese technological surveillance. For Steve, those years were not merely a forgettable interlude before his triumph with the iPod, iPhone and iPad, but rather the crucible in which the mature Jobs was forged. The impulsive prodigy of his early days – ousted by his own team due to his volatile temperament – learnt to rein in his ambition and transform his self-destructive perfectionism into a method.

On the sidelines lies the paradoxical fate of NeXT: a company that failed to make a commercial breakthrough, but which, in 1996, when it was acquired by Apple – then in the throes of a deep crisis – brought with it far more than just cutting-edge technology. It brought Jobs himself back to the fold, and with him the operating system that would form the backbone of macOS and the entire contemporary Apple ecosystem. Cain does not demolish the Jobs myth, but deconstructs it, presenting the reader with a more fragile and human figure – and therefore a more credible one. The Italian edition features a fine introduction by Diego Piacentini, who spent years at the helm of Apple.

Geoffrey Cain

Egea, 376 pp., 26 euros