New Steve Jobs Book Reveals the Wild Voicemail That Saved Apple from BeOS Disaster

Cupertino, Calif. — Think about how close Apple came to committing corporate suicide in the mid-1990s. They were bleeding cash, pushing out the atrocious, confusing “Performa” line of computers, and desperately shopping around for a new operating system to keep from going under. They almost bought BeOS—which, let’s be totally honest, would have been a disaster in the long run.

In another timeline, we are all walking around with BeOS-powered iPhones. Shudder at that thought for a second. Enter Geoffrey Cain’s fantastic new book, Steve Jobs in Exile, which released last month.

It reminds us in brutal, fascinating detail that Jobs’ wilderness years at NeXT weren’t just a bitter side-quest. It was the crucible that forged the modern digital world.

To understand why this era matters, you have to look at the software. NeXT as a hardware company was a massive commercial flop, selling only about 50,000 black cube workstations.

But the operating system? Pure, unadulterated genius. As Cain beautifully puts it, NeXTSTEP was “Steve’s attempt to make Unix taste sweet.” It was elegant, robust, and years ahead of its time.

When Apple eventually bought NeXT, this software became the literal skeleton of OS X (now macOS), iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Every time you swipe your iPhone today, you are essentially interacting with 1980s NeXT code.

But the path to this integration was messy. Tech historians love to point out that Tim Berners-Lee created the very first World Wide Web server on a NeXT machine while working at CERN in 1990. It’s a great piece of trivia.

However, Cain’s book uncovers a hilarious, terrifying detail: the engineers at NeXT were actually afraid to tell Steve Jobs about the web. They didn’t want him to know.

Why? Because they feared his infamous wrath and were convinced he would look at the early, text-heavy web and dismiss it as “shit.” It is wild to think that the birth of the modern internet was kept secret from Jobs because his staff was walking on eggshells.

The wildest anecdote in the book, though, is the sheer dumb luck of how Jobs got back into Apple in the first place. By 1996, NeXT was struggling just as badly as Apple.

During a frantic brainstorming session, a mid-level NeXT product manager named Garrett blurted out, “Why don’t we just frickin’ call Apple?” He literally walked back to his desk, picked up his designer desk phone, and cold-called Apple’s head of software.

Garrett left what he called “one of my more inspired sales pitches” on the man’s voicemail, begging him to look at NeXTSTEP instead of BeOS. In any other corporate setting, going rogue like that would get a mid-level manager fired. But it worked. The voicemail bypassed weeks of corporate red tape, caught Apple’s attention, and set the wheels in motion for the historic merger.

It is a stark reminder that history is often built on a foundation of desperate, late-night phone calls.

It is easy to look back at Apple’s multi-trillion-dollar empire and assume it was all an inevitable march of destiny.

But as the stories in Ars Technica and Cain’s book prove, it was held together by scotch tape, lucky voicemails, and terrified engineers keeping secrets from their temperamental boss.

The next time your Mac boots up smoothly, you might want to thank a rogue product manager who decided to make a frickin’ phone call.