Geoffrey Cain’s forthcoming book Steve Jobs in Exile (May 19) argues NeXT Computer, not Apple mythology, is where Jobs learned the discipline that made Apple 2.0 possible.
Key Takeaways
NeXT’s customer base (universities, labs, intelligence agencies) forced Jobs to realize buyers wanted the software, not the hardware, a lesson that shaped Apple’s platform strategy.
Object-oriented programming via NeXTSTEP became the direct technical ancestor of all modern Apple operating systems; today’s Apple devices run on NeXT foundations.
The first app store appeared on a NeXT machine in 1988, built on OOP libraries that prefigured how all modern apps are constructed.
Pixar succeeded where NeXT hardware failed partly because Ed Catmull and John Lasseter barred Jobs from creative meetings, forcing him into dealmaking and executive discipline.
Cain argues Ternus-era Apple is a hardware-maintenance story, not a Jobs-style invention story, with AI ceded to Google and OpenAI while Apple bets on invisible, integrated AI in devices.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters pushed back hard on the article’s technical framing: the claim that Jobs “discovered” OOP and that NeXT hosted the “first ever app store” is widely seen as crediting Jobs with inventions that predate him by years, undermining the book’s credibility before it ships.
There is broad consensus that modern macOS/iOS is architecturally NeXT, not legacy Apple, making the “forgotten” framing somewhat overstated since the lineage is well-known among technical audiences.
The existing bibliography on NeXT is thin: Stross’s Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing is the only prior deep-dive, and commenters note it reads as a hit piece, leaving room for a more balanced account.
Notable Comments
@mwenge: flags the OOP paragraph as so mangled it undermines trust in the rest of the author’s technical claims.
@abanana: “now he’s the inventor of OOP” – sharp summary of how Jobs hagiography distorts attribution of pre-existing computer science work.
