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Infinite Loop [Hardcover]

Michael Malone (Author)
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Apple Computer has made for good copy over the years. From its beginnings in the garage owned by Steve Jobs's parents and the launch of the Macintosh to the regimes of John Scully and Gil Amelio, Apple's story is irresistible and has been captured in books such as The Little Kingdom by Michael Moritz, The Macintosh Way by Guy Kawasaki, Insanely Great by Steven Levy, and Apple by Jim Carlton. Now in Infinite Loop, Michael S. Malone offers what may be the best rendition yet of Apple's storied past.

Malone's account begins deep in the heart of Santa Clara Valley and the early lives of Apple's two founders, Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Malone seamlessly interlaces his accounts of the forces that shaped the two Steves--from the nascent electronics industry of the '60s and companies such as Sylvania and Hewlett Packard to Jobs's work at Atari and his repeated, and often deceitful, manipulation of his genius friend, the Woz. From these early beginnings, Malone takes the reader through the life of Apple Computer: its founding and launch of the Apple I, the return of Steve Jobs, the rollout of the iMac. In the end, Malone, a journalist who grew up in Silicon Valley and first covered Apple in 1979, writes that Apple was a company with lots of attitude but one that was bereft of character, and only when that fact was laid bare "did the essential hollowness of the enterprise stand exposed." Infinite Loop is a wonderfully written, even gripping, corporate biography that anyone who has fallen under Apple's spell will enjoy. Recommended. --Harry C. Edwards

From Publishers Weekly

Two years ago, this could have been the definitive book about why one of the world's most well-known brand names almost went out of business. But Apple has since bounced back, rendering someAbut not allAof Malone's analysis moot. (In fact, in his foreword, Malone admits that, having abandoned his Mac for a PC, he is now eyeing an Apple G3Athough he calls the iMac "Steve Jobs's triumph of image over reality.") Still, even given the bad timing, Malone presents a cogent account of how Apple ran into trouble. Malone, editor of the technology magazine, Forbes ASAP, grew up near Apple's founders, worked for the company for a time and has covered the firm since its inception. He unearths new information about the company's founders, Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, and he puts them in a far less flattering light than the common hagiography, which presents the two as a pair of garage-bound tinkerers and idealists. The story he tells is how hubris, arrogance and IBM-sized egos prevented Apple's execs from diversifying the company's product line. Determined to write the definitive revisionist history of Apple, Malone takes special aim at the company's famous corporate culture: "Of all the great companies of recent memory, there is only one that seemed to have no character, but only an attitude, a style, a collection of mannerisms. It constructed a brilliant simulacrum of character, in a way a man without empathy or conscience can pretend to have those traits." Such sentences abound in a book thatAat least among Apple execs and the company's famously loyal customersAwill be greeted with something other than a smile.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 608 pages
  • Publisher: Doubleday Business; 1 edition (February 16, 1999)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0385486847
  • ISBN-13: 978-0385486842
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,092,265 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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More About the Author

Michael S. Malone
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Customer Reviews

41 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.8 out of 5 stars (41 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Infinite Loop - definitely slanted, but comprehensive, February 23, 2000
This review is from: Infinite Loop (Hardcover)
As a devout Mac user, I've been interested in reading Infinite Loop since it was released. And boy is it good -- although it's definitely biased, and Malone certainly has an axe to grind with Steve Jobs and Apple.

The book is good for recounting the story of Apple -- from its rise out of Jobs' garage to his sacking, the dark ages of the mid nineties and the company's reemergence with the iMac. Of course, Malone is skeptical about the iMac's success, and tries to pass his book off as an eulogy when it's clear that Apple is currently in the midst of a resurgance.

More than anything, this is a corporate history, and is often mired down with business and technological details that might boggle the mind of the uninitiated. But if you're genuinely interested in Apple, the PC industry, and a fascinating story populated with colorful real-life characters (minus Gil Amelio of course), then you should check this book out.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Informative and entertaining, August 1, 2002
By Andy Carnero (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Infinite Loop (Hardcover)
Michael S. Malone's Infinite Loop: How The World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane is the tale of a company that had it all - and blew it.

In the early days of personal computers, Apple had superior technology and customers that displayed fanatical product loyalty. Its young founders became instant archetypes of the bravado and creativity that made the U.S. high-tech industry the envy of the world. But Jobs and Wozniak achieved too much too early in life, and Apple, it seems, lost its magic.

From the unique vantage point of having grown up with Jobs and Wozniak, and having covered Apple for years as a journalist, Malone manages to tell a fascinating behind-the-scenes story of the world?s most insanely great company.

As a technophile, I very much enjoyed this book. As a Mac addict I couldn?t help wanting to put my hands over my eyes and scream as I read about some of the company?s great blunders.

No review would be complete without also noting that while Malone brings to this account authority and understanding of the big picture, his disgust with Steve Jobs at times oozes from the pages of this book. Still, Infinite Loop is a great read and the most comprehensive account of Apple Computer?s history. I also recommend The Little Kingdom by Michael Moritz (if you can find it).
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars How Apple wrotes the story of the PC; then got written out of its own story, February 25, 2007
This review is from: Infinite Loop (Hardcover)
At first the story of the PC industry's scruffy origins, "Infinite Loop" becomes the cautionary fable of Apple Computers - from the garage to the iMac (1999 - the book closes before the dot-com bust and the "iPod".) Though I can't vouch for accuracy, "Loop" is encyclopedic and compelling though at times prone to hyperbole. (Malone uses words like "technologist" in their simplest sense or "guru" and Steve Jobs's famous "reality-distortion field" as if these words were real.) "Loop" is an incredible tale - of great achievement mixed with catastrophe, and promising more of the latter. Apple created great products or at least great ideas, but profits were often stymied and market share eroded. Malone makes an interesting point comparing Apple to Intel, the CPU giant that didn't create the market for processors over which it now reigns with near supremacy - having to find its way in an existing market ensured that Intel would remain a real and practical company; Apple arose when computers were largely fantasy - unsurprisingly, Malone's Apple remains a fantasy of a company.



Bringing computers to the masses, Apple's story unsurprisingly recounts the dawn of American cyber culture. The concept of PC's seems to predate capable technology and quality-assurance. (The original "Apple I" debuted in a time when people bought computer kits, and had to supply their own cases; later Apples suffer all sorts of QA problems.)



Malone offers a fascinating study of a techno-cultural revolution - in which the techno-savvy (who once comprised the entire market for computers) and market-savvy worked with and against each other to bring PC's to a generation of Americans who hadn't yet embraced the VCR (and never learned how to program them). The two sides were best typified by the founding Steves of Apple - Wozniak & Jobs. "Woz", a brilliant, if feckless engineer, was easily the genius of the two, but he was otherwise manipulated like a chess piece by Jobs. If Woz was the brains of Apple, Malone has Jobs as Apple's heart. Charismatic, yet childlike, entrenched in the computer industry while lacking any genuine background in their technology, given to mercurial whims and not infrequently making himself unwelcome, Jobs's life soon eclipses the evolution of computing in the story of Apple's rise and fall.



As Apple grows into a real company (in Malone's view, a genuine-looking company, soon to be robbed of its primacy when real competition appears), the strains appear. When the issues were technological, Woz rescued Apple - among other things, Wozniak refined the iconic Apple II and invent practical disk-drives. IBM entered the fray with its MS-DOS based machines - setting the stage for cheap, if initially unfriendly computers to exile Apple to the market's fringes. With Woz marginalized, Jobs courts John Sculley to take over as CEO, then gets ousted by a Sculley-backed board. In one of the ironies that will prove typical in Apple's story, the two will exchange verbal blows before Apple's board citing each other's respective weaknesses - each side's character assessment will prove painfully accurate. Moreover, the Sculley-Jobs war will set the pattern for succession of Apple's leadership - battles for control of Apple between flawed characters roughly equal in their capacity to doom the company.



Apple peaks at the dawn of the Macintosh - the Mac was impressive, and the "1984" spot aired during Superbowl XVIII is now legendary, but sales were disappointing, the result of mistakes that rendered the machine overpriced and underpowered.



With the arrival of IBM PC's and clones, "Loop" concentrates on Apple rather than the industry which has already begun to marginalize it. The story falls into a bit of a loop itself - returning to contradictory failures and successes, market share and profit margins, boardroom battles, unpopular execs and repeated calls to regain market share by licensing Mac-clones.



"Loop" is a great read, but loses steam in its latter half when it focuses on Apple - we know that Apple is being cut off from that larger digital world, but Malone never shows us how much that world had changed since the days of Woz's garage. Instead of a story showing technology changing the world, we've got dueling execs, indistinguishable from those in other corporate-fables. Malone interjects a bit much, which obscures the line between fact and subjective observation. (ex.: when a post-Apple Sculley is asked to comment on the course of the industry, Malone basically writes "Who the f**k cares what Sculley thought?" - we get the idea, Sculley=bad.) Also, Malone is perhaps a tad too forced in charting how Apple would have progressed had the principals (mostly Jobs, but also Woz) seen the obvious. (Malone has Woz demonstrating a terminal he built/designed for another company well before the dawn of Apple - was the conceptual link between that terminal and the internet that slim?) Lastly, Malone's closing with Jobs's return and the debut of iMac seems forced - with the dot-com bust that followed "Loop", the finality of a story ending in 1999 is, to the say the least, premature. As mentioned by others, Jobs gets tarred here, but he's not alone - painful and embarrassing flaws haunt all of his successors. Worse than failure, they failed and shunted away.



Though weaker in the end, "Loop" is still consistently readable, a compelling (if dated) tale of a company and a dream of all it could be.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Business story for the ages
I have been a Mac user since 1989, and when I purchased this book in 1999, the future of Apple Computer was very much in doubt. Read more
Published 15 months ago by C. Bourseau

5.0 out of 5 stars The best history of Apple Computer yet
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Rating: "A" -- a fresh treatment of a familiar story. Read more
Published on September 12, 2005 by Peter D. Tillman

5.0 out of 5 stars The story of Apple doesn't get better then this.
What can I say. Great Book!!! I got hooked right from the foreword. The writing is crisp and the author has done a elegant job of balancing the history,technology and, people... Read more
Published on January 9, 2003 by sameer borate

2.0 out of 5 stars A library read
Typo laden and factual errors-- and NO citations. (Come on!)

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Published on September 25, 2002 by Dale

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely excellent
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5.0 out of 5 stars An "Insanely Great" Book
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5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended!
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5.0 out of 5 stars Pleasant reading
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4.0 out of 5 stars Vicious
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Having been an Apple enthusiast since the Apple IIe, I was intrigued by this new history book an Apple Computer. Read more
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