Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World's Most Colorful Company 2nd Edition

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.

I eagerly bought Apple Confidential 2.0 after reading a positive article about it on a well known computer news web site. This book doesn't disappoint - I read the entire thing cover to cover in about three days, although in retrospect, it would have been fun to spread it out a bit more to enjoy it longer.The book is well written and easy to read, and very importantly in this often heated subject matter, it appears to be genuinely unbiased. Featuring the story of Apple Computer Inc. from its inception to the present, the book not only gives a general overview of the good and bad times at Apple, but also presents many juicy tidbits. Sidebars throughout the text present numerous quotes from well known players - Steve Jobs, Wozniak, and many others. Pictures of some of the early machines are provided as well as timelines for various products and CEO's.As another bonus, the resignation letters of several of Apple's CEO's are included in the text.On the downside, the latter part of the book is not quite as good with several omissions such as mention of the wildly popular XServe and the Virginia Tech supercomputer cluster made with XServe's. This seems like a fairly glaring oversight considering how important the enterprise market is to Apple these days.Overall, I think any Apple history buff would find the book fascinating, and I can even imagine that the book would be interesting to people who don't know much about Apple at all. The history of Apple is quite interesting and should provide engaging reading material for nearly anyone.What are you waiting for? Buy the book!

Yes lots of truths and sometimes the real people and political Drama is really missing. What an incredible place to have worked. I was at Apple from March 86 until April 1992. I worked in US and Global Supply Chain Distribution/ Operations inc. a stint for Claris as we built clones under a pirate flag in The early 90’s. An incredible Journey and time. I could write my own book on the experiences and people/politics many mentioned in this book plus many more. Good book covers many of the Crazy stories with an abundance distracting and deflecting detail.

I originally bought this book when I started a research report at school on Apple Inc. The book seemed like the encyclopedia of Apple and I purchased it as a research tool. When I flipped through the book after i received it, I noticed a couple things. Firstly, the book wasn't just a wall of text, there were many pictures and quotes, which captured interesting moments in Apple's history. Also, there were many useful charts for Apple's financial information and interesting timelines for each product or important employee. The book was a great read, and it kept me interested the whole time. I also found great facts and based much of my research on this book. But don't get me wrong, this book isn't like a boring reference book. It is full of exciting narratives, descriptions of unique Apple products, and is written VERY well by Owen Linzmayer.On top of this, I was lacking some first person experiences and knowledge on Apple, and needed to find an interviewee. To add to the superbness of the book, it included the contact information of the author, Owen Linzmayer. I emailed him asking if we could talk, and received a reply within the next day. From there, we were able to set a time to talk on the phone, and we ended up talking for about 30 minutes. He was easy to talk to, had many interesting stories to tell, and really knew what he was talking about. Overall, the interview helped me complete my research project, and I also learned a lot from it.I STRONLY RECCOMEND THAT YOU BUY THIS BOOK!-Matthew Leong

Incomplete and far from definitive, but this contains some interesting tit-bits, as well as quite a lot of advertorial and waffle, and much that was never confidential. Speaking as someone typing on a Mac in 2014 with my original 1978 Apple ][ manual still at hand, far more could be said, and when it is this book will be just a footnote.Andy Hertzfeld's book Revolution in the Valley, is a lot truer to the Apple spirit, though focussed on the early 80s and the original Mac development, while Steve Wozniak's iWoz does a similarly illuminating job for the Apple ][ years. But they were there at the time, doing the fundamental work that made Apple; Linzmayer was not, and it shows.