Between Jobs

Tech Apple Between Jobs With Steve Jobs in exile, Apple’s ‘90s featured some of its most lasting triumphs and weirdest failures. by Jason Snell Mar 31, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC Image: Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Part Of Apple @ 50 see all Jason Snell has covered Apple for over 25 years and was the lead editor at Macworld for over a decade. He currently blogs at Six Colors and podcasts on Relay FM and The Incomparable . This is part of our package about Apple’s 50th anniversary, read more here . It’s a famous story on its way to becoming legendary: Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple in 1985, spent more than a decade in the wilderness, and then returned to Apple in 1997 to save it from bankruptcy and transform it into one of the world’s most valuable companies. That’s true, so far as it goes, but this interregnum is too often simplified as when Apple CEO John Sculley got rid of Steve and ruined the company. And that’s really not true. Not only was the Jobs who was ejected from Apple completely unprepared to run the company (as his disastrous but educational years at NeXT would prove), but the Apple of this period had some real accomplishments. From making necessary changes to the Mac to the creation of the PowerBook, Apple didn’t simply weather the 12 years without Jobs. The company made shifts, adaptations, and decisions that would become foundational to its future. Were there missteps? Most definitely. But ignoring Apple’s successes over those dozen years undermines the truer, deeper story of how Apple survived to become the behemoth it is today. Victories of the interregnum Foremost among Apple’s achievements in the first post-Steve era was the Mac itself. Yes, Jobs was the one who took over the Mac project in 1982 (from the originator of the project, Jef Raskin) and molded it into the adorable original beige all-in-one Macintosh with a mouse-driven graphical user interface. But when it came time to build the Mac into a thriving platfor...