Steve Jobs was fired from his own company in 1985. It was messy. It was public. And honestly, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to modern computing. After getting booted from Apple, Jobs didn’t just sit around sulking with his millions; he started NeXT, a company that aimed to build the most advanced workstation the world had ever seen.
The result? A gorgeous, matte-black magnesium cube that almost nobody bought.
By most business metrics, the NeXT Computer was a disaster. It was overpriced, it was late, and it tried to solve problems people didn't even know they had yet. But if you look under the hood, the DNA of that "failure" is exactly why you’re likely reading this on an iPhone or a Mac today.
The $6,500 Cube That Changed Everything
When Jobs unveiled the first NeXT Computer in 1988, he didn't just want a PC. He wanted a "3M" machine: at least one megabyte of RAM, a mega-pixel display, and a mega-flop of processing power. He ended up over-delivering on the specs and the price tag.
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The original machine launched at $6,500. In 2026 dollars, that’s roughly like asking someone to drop $17,000 on a desktop.
It was a tough sell. Higher education—the target market—mostly looked at the price and walked away. But the hardware was admittedly stunning. It was a perfect one-foot-by-one-foot cube. Jobs was so obsessed with the aesthetics that he insisted the inside of the case be painted, even though users would never see it. He also forced the factory to be a masterpiece of automation, painted in pristine white, because he believed the environment where a product is made affects its quality.
Some wild specs for 1988:
- Motorola 68030 CPU running at 25 MHz.
- 8MB of RAM (expandable to 64MB, which was insane for the time).
- Magneto-optical drive: Instead of a standard floppy, it used a 256MB rewritable optical disk.
- DSP (Digital Signal Processor): This allowed the computer to handle complex sound and music, like playing a "duet" with a live violinist during its debut.
The problem was that the magneto-optical drive was slow. Like, painfully slow. Users hated waiting for it to spin up just to save a file. Eventually, NeXT had to cave and offer traditional hard drives.
What Really Happened With the World Wide Web
Here’s a bit of trivia that usually wins bets: the internet as we know it wasn’t built on a Mac or a Windows PC. It was built on a NeXT.
In 1990, a scientist named Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN. He needed a powerful system to organize information, and he chose a NeXT Computer. On that machine, he wrote the first web browser (originally called WorldWideWeb) and the first web server.
Why did he pick NeXT? Because the software environment, NeXTSTEP, was lightyears ahead of anything else. It allowed him to build complex applications in months rather than years. Essentially, the "object-oriented" nature of the system meant he could treat pieces of code like Lego bricks.
If Jobs hadn't obsessed over making NeXTSTEP so developer-friendly, the Web might have looked very different—or taken much longer to arrive.
The Secret Sauce: NeXTSTEP and Objective-C
If you’re a coder, you know that NeXTSTEP is the real legacy here. While the hardware division was bleeding money—NeXT only sold about 50,000 computers in its entire run—the software was a masterpiece.
Jobs eventually realized the hardware was a lost cause. In 1993, he shut down the factory and pivoted to NeXT Software, Inc. The system was built on a Mach kernel and BSD Unix. It was stable, it had a "Dock" (sound familiar?), and it used a language called Objective-C. When Apple bought NeXT in 1996 for roughly $429 million, they weren't buying the magnesium cubes. They were buying the operating system because their own software, Copland, had turned into a flaming dumpster fire.
When you see a file on a Mac today that ends in .nib or see "NS" (for NeXTSTEP) at the start of a class in Apple's programming code, you're looking at ghosts from 1988. Every "NSWindow" or "NSString" in an iPhone app is a direct link back to Steve's "failed" company.
The Most Successful Failure in History
By 1996, Apple was months away from bankruptcy. They had a choice: buy BeOS (from another ex-Apple guy, Jean-Louis Gassée) or buy NeXT.
Apple’s then-CEO Gil Amelio chose NeXT.
It was the ultimate "reverse takeover." Jobs didn't just return as an advisor; he brought his whole team from NeXT. Avie Tevanian became the software chief. Jon Rubinstein took over hardware. Within a year, Jobs was the "Interim CEO," and he started axing Apple's bloated product line to focus on the things he'd learned at NeXT: simplicity, high-end design, and a rock-solid Unix foundation.
Basically, NeXT didn't die. It just put on an Apple-shaped suit and took over the world.
Lessons from the NeXT Era
- Quality is never a waste. Even if the product fails, the innovations you make (like the Dock or the App Store precursor) will find a home eventually.
- Pivoting is survival. Jobs could have gone down with the hardware ship. Instead, he saved the software, which saved Apple.
- The "3M" standard still matters. Always build for where the puck is going, even if people complain about the price today.
If you want to see the legacy of the NeXT Computer for yourself, just open the "Activity Monitor" on a modern Mac. Look at the process names. You’ll find Unix-based roots that haven't changed in thirty years. It’s a reminder that sometimes, being "too early" to the market looks a lot like failing—right until the rest of the world catches up.
To truly understand this era, look into the "Cubic" design philosophy of the 80s or study the original WebObjects framework. It’s the closest you’ll get to seeing how the modern cloud was actually blueprinted.