Customer Reviews

Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer, Inc.

5 star:		(78)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Of all the books written on Apple's history, this one comes closest to accurately relating the story of how the Mac was created, and other early Apple events.

I can't personally vouch for Linzmeyer's discussion of more recent history, because I left Apple a while ago, but having seen the results of his careful research where I personally took part in the events, and having seen the massive inaccuracies in many other books, I'd bet on his.

Some other books are more exciting reads, but that's because they're partially fiction. Linzmeyer has done his homework. But don't get the impression that this book is dull; it's fun, with many interesting tidbits and historical photographs.

This is the book to read if you are interested in fact rather than legend.

This book combines gossip, history, trivia and the legends & lore of one of America's most fascinating companies. The story starts with the two Steves making and selling boxes to confuse the phone system into granting free calls. It chronicals the development of Apple computer from the first Apple through the Lisa, endless varities of Macintosh and today's iPod. Throughout the story, the massive ups and collosal failures of this American instution are laid bare.

The layout is interesting as well. As characters are introduced, the reader frequently wonders "What happened to them?" More often than not, the question is answered in a sidebar. This showed that Apple wasn't just a great product developer, but also a great developer of silicon valley talent.

The book details the extremes of the players personalities:
- How Jobs agreet to split the proceeds of an Atari deal with Woz, only to keep 90% of the income himself.
- How Woz forced the company to go public early by sharing his stock with too many employees.
- How Gasse talked folks out of liscencing the technology until it was too late.
- How several successive CEOs tried in vain to save the company.

The book also details some lesser known stories from Apple's storied past:
- How the 1984 commercial almost never made it.
- How the company decided to abandon Copland. (& Why!)
- How the company got sued by Carl Sagan, and how they dug their ditch a little deeper.

There's a lot of "Hows" here, which really shows how deep the author gets into the company's history and soul. You come away with not just a knowledge of the people, but their personalities and why exactly things turned out the way they did.

This book is excellent reading for anyone interested in the world of technology, and an absolute must for fans of Apple.

This is a must-have book for any fan of Apple. It's possibly the most thorough - yet still readable - history of the company. It mixes business facts, behind-the-scenes secrets, and pop culture tidbits beautifully. Along the way, you'll learn the ins and outs of other computer companies (Microsoft, IBM, AOL, NeXT, Power Computing, Xerox PARC, etc) and a lot about the history of the industry in general and the players in particular.

Linzmayer is the author of "The Mac Bathroom Reader," and knows what he's talking about. Not only does "Apple Confindential" add more history that wasn't in that volume, but it's redesigned, updated to this year, and includes Steve Jobs' return and the iMac success.

In a word, breathtaking: It has quotes from everyone involved, timelines, products lists, a history, a little opinion, analysis, stock info, classic pictures. It's all here.

I'd write more, but I'm going to read it again. And I now know what to give other Apple fans for gifts.

Linzmayer's book is an excellent addition to the library of any computer enthusiast and/or historian. This is a well-written, comprehensive work covering a broad range of Apple topics: the development of the Macintosh, the executives, the spin-offs (NeXT and Be), etc.. For a high-level overview of the company to OS X, this is a fine work. One particular feature that I loved was the inclusion of sidebar information, providing background, quotes (many of these are fantastic), and "where are they now" information without distracting the reader.

That said, Linzmayer doesn't sound entirely objective and his likes and dislikes seem rather apparent. That said, if you read this book with a certain political bent (particularly a pro-Jobs one), then you may not like the way certain events are portrayed. A further complaint is the focus on executives without providing enough (in my opinion) about the engineers and thinkers. Personally, I think that more on Woz, Tribble, Tesler, Hertzfeld, etc. would be worth far more than the highs and lows of Sculley's marketing dreams. In this regard, I would say that the best history of Apple, particularly from a technical standpoint is Hertzfeld's Revolution in the Valley.

Bottom line: This is an excellent overview of Apple history. Included among a library of works - I might mention the excellent bibliography included in the book - then Apple Confidential rounds things out wonderfully. A few caveats aside, I recommend reading this book.

Apple Computer has always been a fascination for me. Ever since I heard of them, I thought they were a top-notch company, providing quality computers for the consumer with a lot of disposable cash. Computers in general were much more expensive when they first hit the market and Apple offered the first home machines. I've never owned a home computer until 2000. I remember doing so much research. As my wife is a photographer, Apple came to the front, with their reputation for excellent image handling. We decided to purchase an iMac. This purchase was followed with buying an iBook in 2001 for my wife.

To this day, I continue to be amazed by our Macs and what we've been able to do and learn since we got them. Now, if only the budget had room for a loaded G5, I know where we would be headed.

Shortly after our Mac came home, we found The NorthWest of Us, a Chicago area Macintosh User Group and joined up. There has been no better source of support for whatever troubles needed troubleshooting. Beside the support, I was struck with the passion of these people who used Mac computers and could not really understand the profound enthusiasm they had for their platform of choice. Simply, I felt that Macs were very efficient and quite easy to use and that's what we hoped for when we purchased ours. I was looking for something that would help me to understand a bit more about the mystique surrounding Apple Computer and it's products. I found Apple Confidential 2.0.

This book covers the how's and why's of Apple's start up and the passion of the founders, especially Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. You can see the genius of them as they put everything they owned on the line to create the first personal computers-Woz for his passion to create and design, Steve for his desire for perfection and success. You can easily understand how their personalities first nurtured each other and how they would come to necessarily separate themselves from each other.

Apple Confidential 2.0 gives you insight to many corporate business decisions, both amazing and really stupid. As I read, I found myself wondering how this company managed to survive at all. The book contains many time lines following the life cycles of the Apple I and II, the ill-fated Apple III and Lisa, the multitudinous computer variations offered for sale (my gosh, how confusing!) and the Mac OS. Yes, there's more, but these were the most interesting for me. I found the fumbling that went on within the company to be nothing if not infuriating, the misdirection, the false starts and, most of all, the loss of product quality and innovation. Lately, I often wondered why one of my coworkers hated Macs. After reading about the thousands of defective Macs put on the market instead of in the garbage heap, sure enough, it was one of those that she had to put up with and could not wait to dump! If I had been a Mac user then, I'm sure I'd be in her camp too.

The business decisions made over the years at Apple can make your head spin. The issue of licensing the Mac OS is a fascinating read; back and forth, over and over again. If Apple had licensed their OS early on, I'm sure we would be in a 'Windows-free' world. After all, that's what Bill Gates would have preferred anyway. (Of course, you have to wonder just how virus-free the Mac OS would be if it were on 95+% of the computers out there too.)

Then, there's Bill Gates and his ties to Apple-something I thought could never have occurred, but I didn't realize that he was NOT the competition in the first place. Rather, it appears that he was one of the foremost proponents of the Apple computer. Again, I'm relatively new to owning a home computer, but I knew all along that Mac people could not stand Microsoft. I was really surprised to learn that Word and Excel were originally Macintosh programs. I never knew that, but it makes sense when you consider the vastness of the installed base of those Office products-and just how much $$$ Bill gets from Office for Mac users.

Apple Confidential 2.0 is a very good read. You don't have to read it cover-to-cover, although once I picked it up, there was no way I was going to skip around. My wife, who's more disconnected from OS platforms that I am, picked it up and I had to insist she give it back so I could finish it. Owen's writing style is excellent, giving just enough humor to keep you interested. Although you could consider it a course study book, this book is for anyone who is a Mac enthusiast or someone interested in touching on business history. It has many pictures and great sidebar information and quotes, many of those really surprising and funny.

As with any history book, Owen has placed in it what he saw as the most salient issues surrounding Apple and not everything, by his admission, is included. One issue I think should have been touched on was drugs. I remember a made-for-TV movie that was broadcast several years ago. It may have been called 'Pirates of Silicon Valley', but I'm not sure. The movie was spun toward Bill Gates and what he did with regard to Apple. In it, several major players were depicted to have been pretty deep into LSD and other drugs. True? Or not? I'm leaning toward true. If you read this book, I think it's the only thing that would make sense of the really strange turns the company took.

Everything considered, I highly recommend Apple Confidential 2.0 both for it's "definitive history of the world's most colorful company" and for it's easy, fun readability.

Thank You, Owen!

After reading the insufferable iWoz, I wanted a book about the early days of Apple that didn't suck. A friend gave me Apple Confidential 2.0 for my birthday, and it was just what the doctor ordered. It emphatically didn't suck.

This is a well-written account of Apple, from the early pre-Apple blue box days through the book's 2004 publication. Instead of taking a traditional day-by-day walk through the company's history, Linzmayer arranges his chapters by topic. This makes following the individual threads of Apple much easier. Extra quotes and notes are included in the margins, which add colour and depth to the story. Jef Raskin, who unabashedly called himself the father of the Macintosh, said that this book was the most accurate depiction of how the original Mac was created.

Each chapter mostly stands alone. Since each chapter covers only one topic (say, the development of the Newton), some of the chapters in the tumultuous 90s are a bit hard to follow if you're not already aware of certain pieces of Apple history. Many topics are referenced without a word of explanation, just an occasional pointer to the later chapter. The most glaring examples of this are the references to Be, the Star Trek project, and Copland.

The chapter about the Star Trek project is a great example of another problem of the book. It's too early to talk about more recent developments. Star Trek was the project started in 1992 to bring the Mac OS to Intel. According to this book, the project was shelved in 1993. Typing on a MacTel today, it's obvious that the project was resurrected. I know that I'm not alone in wondering how this actually came about.

Even with those complaints, I recommend the book. The early days of Apple are interesting indeed, and understanding them is critical to understanding Apple today.

Owen Linzmayer's "Apple Confidential 2.0" book is a must have for people interested in the history, culture, people and technology behind Apple Computer Inc.

This book (and Owen's previous Apple histories "The Mac Bathroom Reader" and "Apple Confidential [1.0]") has been meticously researched and uncovers many facts about Apple Computer, its people, and systems that other books don't come close to touching. Instead of rehashing comments from other books which tend to be inaccurate, Owen has spent a tremendous amount of time finding and verifying facts. Instead of just relying on a comment about some aspect of Apple Computer, Owen has taken the time and put forth the effort to communicate directly with those involved with the facts in question. This results in accurate facts, something that many technology computing books about Apple don't always have.

I've been involved with Apple systems since the Apple ][ of the later 1970s and am constantly suprised by the information Owen has uncovered. At one time I thought I knew a lot about Apple's history, but Owen has proven me wrong in a beneficial way.

The end result of Owen's work is an almost definitive book about a fascinating and quirky company that any Apple computer user must have in their book collection.

I'm looking forward to the next Apple Confidential version if such a book will exist in the future.

-David T Craig ( shirlgato AT cybermesa DOT com )

If you are a mac zealot or the friend/relative of one, this is a must buy (although now buying the newer 2.0 edition is more appropriate). Every chapter is a fairly well researched juicy read, into the secrets (and simply excellent stories) of Apple Computer throughout its 30 year history.

The one minor issue is the insertion of the author's point of view regarding some figures that perhaps creates a little bias. Jean Louisse Gasee (sic) comes to a mind as a would be visionary perhaps beyond his true significance (although he certainly is an important historical Apple figure that is too often overlooked). Also Spindler is lauded while his true good for the company is certainly questionable.

However this minor critique does not take enough away to lower the 5 star rating! This is a true page turner and a must read for Apple fans everywhere.

[A review of the 2nd EDITION.]

Apple has always garnered curiosity, as one of the most creative high tech companies in the world. This book tries to assuage that interest, updated to 2004. It covers in detail many aspects of the company's tumultuous history.

Some tidbits are mentioned that other books on Apple often omit. Like how along with Jobs and Wozniak, there was another co-founder, Wayne. But he sold his interest for around $2k, before Apple went public. Linzmayer estimates that had Wayne held his stock, it would have been worth $500 million in 2000. Ah, the what-ifs. He says that Wayne seemed genuinely unmiffed by this. But the reader must surely wonder otherwise. Like the story of the fifth Beatle. The divergent fates of Wayne, Jobs and Wozniak might be seen as a parable of Silicon Valley.

The book describes events up to 2003-2004. Just in time to include a discussion of the smash hit that is the iPod, and of ancillary packages like iTunes. While perhaps these are too recent to be easily evaluated, Linzmayer doesn't shirk from offering a timely analysis.

While I have rarely used Apple products, I know people who are evangelical about them. To such people, Gates and his group are evil incarnate and Jobs and his group is pure and untainted. However, like so many people who have achieved everlasting fame, a lot of what Jobs has achieved was taken from others. In this recapitulation of the history of Apple from the beginnings to Jobs' triumphal return, you learn a lot about Jobs that is not pretty. He is self-serving, mean, mercurial, deceitful and often wrong.
However, Steve Wozniak comes across as a great person. It was Woz who made sure that the little people at Apple received some form of compensation, even when it came from his own pockets. Success never overcame him, he has always remained humble and respectful of others. Even when he learned that Steve Jobs had cheated him, he did not seek revenge or even publicize the incident.
The history of Apple is another example of an incredible "what might have been" in the history of computing. Apple was technically years ahead of all others, including Microsoft, so had they been willing to license their GUI technology, it is possible that Microsoft Windows would never have existed. It is one more historical example that the Microsoft operating system near monopoly is due as much to luck as it is to skill.
Through all of the ups and downs, Apple has managed to survive, although at times it was very close. This history of the repeated cycle of rising and falling of a major technology player is one of the most interesting stories of the last century. It is nothing like the tales portrayed by people who consider all of Apple's problems to have been due to evil forces outside the company. Major mistakes were made by the Apple executives, including Jobs, and from this book you will learn that most of the damage was self-inflicted.