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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 platform and business, Apple’s cofounder resisted most suggestions because they conflicted with his idealized notion of what the Mac could be.
1st Apple Macintosh (Mac) 128K computer, released January 24, 1984 by Steve Jobs. Photo by Apic/Getty Images CEO of Apple Computer John Sculley posing in front of dozens of his happy designers & engineers grouped behind him who were the recipients of plaques & checks he gave out during a ceremony to honor the most innovative employees in the office at company H.Q; Silicon Valley Photo by Acey Harper/Getty Images
Specifically, Jobs resisted the idea of adding Apple II-like slots to the Mac. Once Jobs was gone, replaced by former Apple Europe director Jean-Louis Gassée, the Mac business took off, finally eclipsing the sales of the Apple II. The introduction of the slot-laden Mac II series in 1987 led to dramatically increased sales to businesses, allowing Apple to entrench itself in the fields of design and publishing. Similarly, the Mac SE, also introduced in 1987, revised the original Mac design to add an optional internal hard drive, making it a much more viable computer than the old Mac, with its endless requirement to swap floppy disks in and out.
In 1991, the original PowerBooks were created — possibly the crowning achievement of this entire era. Apple’s first laptop, the Macintosh Portable, released two years earlier, was a disastrous “luggable” that combined poor performance with an ungainly heavy design. But for the follow-up, Apple’s engineers completely rethought the laptop. Early PC laptops had their keyboards pushed all the way up to the front edge, and if you needed a pointing device (which, let’s face it, PC laptops running DOS often didn’t), it would be an afterthought sticking off the side.
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