Today in Apple history: Steve Jobs talks to Rolling Stone

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Steve Jobs during the NeXT years.
Steve Jobs during the NeXT years.
Photo: Doug Menuez/Fearless Genius

thursday16 There was, to put it mildly, a lot that was insanely great about Steve Jobs’ return to Apple. But one thing that always struck me as less than good from an Apple fan’s perspective was that he stopped giving revealing in-depth interviews.

As his ability to command the narrative increased, Apple’s CEO understandably shifted away from playing the media hound he’d been for the first part of his career, where he’d speak with often painful honesty to seemingly any magazine that would have him. One of his last such interviews? The one that appeared in the June 16, 1994, edition of Rolling Stone.

No Jobs in sight!
No Jobs in sight!
Photo: Rolling Stone

Given how significant Jobs is as a global icon, not just in geeky tech circles, it’s telling about where Steve was in 1994 that he didn’t even make the cover of the magazine. The main image is of the band Soundgarden, which was then celebrating its 10th birthday (just as, incidentally, the Mac was). The other big story on the cover was an article about Richard Nixon, who had died earlier that year.

Jobs, by comparison, was running a failing tech company (the popular perception of NeXT at the time, even if it did lead to many of the innovations that defined Apple upon Jobs’ return). The interview finds him in a contemplative mood, having shut down the NeXT hardware department in 1993 and running the risk of “[disappearing] into hyperspace,” as interviewer Jeff Goodell notes in his introduction.

The interview hints at many of the things Jobs was already thinking he would change about Apple if he was still there: from the Mac’s lack of innovation, which allowed Microsoft to catch up, to his belief that “small teams of three, four, five people” are going to shape the future of app development — something that the App Store would eventually make perfectly clear.

It’s well worth a read and, as I’ve noted before, I’m fascinated by Jobs’ “wilderness years” at NeXT. They often get glossed over by people who act like it was some tiny blip between Jobs’ stints at Apple, rather than a formative, decade-long period in a professional career that only lasted 35 years.

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