Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World's Most Colorful Company
by Owen Linzmayer, Owen W. Linzmayer

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Book Reviews of Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World's Most Colorful Company

Book Review: Apple Confidential 2.0
Summary: 5 Stars

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!

Summary of Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World's Most Colorful Company

Linzmayer's tale does have a few drawbacks. Because he mixes a chronological narrative with chapters that focus on key points in the Apple story, he sometimes repeats himself. Case in point: the chapter "Big Bad Blunders" makes a great record of Apple's failures, but the story of the exploding Powerbook 5300s is duplicated at later points. Nonetheless, Apple Confidential is rife with gems that will appeal to Apple fanatics and followers of the computer industry. Especially enjoyable are the revelation of "Easter eggs" that are hidden in several versions of the Mac operating system; the many screen shots, timelines, and telling quotes from Jobs, Gates, Wozniak and others that populate the margins and concluding sections of each chapter; the "Code Names Uncovered" section that makes public the monikers of several secret Apple projects; and Bill Gates's 1985 letter to John Sculley and Jean Louis Gassee pleading for Apple to license Mac technology and develop a "standard personal computer." --Patrick O'Kelley

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