Michael Moritz — then a Time reporter, later chairman of Sequoia Capital — was given the run of Apple in 1981–82, before anyone was managing the Jobs legend. His contemporaneous account captures the founding, the Apple II's rise, the Macintosh development, and Jobs's ascension and fall, all reported without the filter of hindsight. The 2010 reissue adds new framing chapters that connect the original reporting to the later turnaround.
The value of Moritz's account is that it was written before the legend ossified. He had access no later biographer had — Jobs in his twenties, the early Apple team before the story was settled — and the reporting is specific, unheroic, and granular. Jobs is brilliant and impossible, the Apple II is a shambolic success, and the Macintosh team operates on intensity and fear. There is no 'visionary' scaffolding yet; just a very talented, very difficult young founder with enormous taste and no patience.
For founders, Return to the Little Kingdom is a primary source on what a startup actually looks like before it becomes a company. Moritz later became a legendary venture capitalist, and his reporting eye is already trained on the patterns that matter: how decisions were actually made, who actually did the work, and how the culture that produced the Mac was a fragile accident of specific people in a specific moment. The book is a reminder that the biographies get written after the outcome is known, but the work happens when nobody knows how it ends.