Corporate-finance

I, personally, could not stop reading this book, despite the mind-numbing repitition and poor metaphors. It is somewhat saved because (I understand?) it is fairly accurate. What compelled me the most about this book was not the combination of bad decisions and bad luck, with some bad economics thrown in, that made the downfall of the company that invented the personal computer equally as fast as its rise. What I found the most compelling was the obvious pride of the fantastically intelligent think-factory that was Apple. Read between the lines, at it is obvious that Apple engineers had a genuine love for beautiful code: code that was thrown out at Apple is the code that Microsoft SELLS. Look especcially for the famous story of shaving the seconds off the startup of the mac 128K. The work was worth it, wasn't it? No matter how hard Carlton paints Apple as a failure of generals following different trails, he cannot hide the success and hope of the individuals who invented, reinvented, and most recently, fully made good on the promise of the personal computer.

Useful history and inside looks, but reading his 1998 back-of-the-hand dismissal of Apple's chances of survival is pretty humorous nowadays. His opinion that Apple should have licensed earlier is similarly wrong-headed and lacking in any technical appreciation of the downsides of licensing (dilution of brand,difficult QA processes, cherry-picking, loss of platform homogenieity ).

He similarly doesn't understand the silliness of Apple developing an x86 MacOS in the early 90's, and again reveals his technical ineptitude by failing to pursue the ramifications of an Apple-brand x86 offering (ie a Mac with an x86 CPU) vs a software-only offering like Windows or NeXT's Yellow Box.

He also repeatedly blows the 5300 battery issue out of proportion.

But I think the weakest theme in the book is that an alternative platform with less than 10% "marketshare" is automatically doomed to failure. While there is a strong positive network effect for the 'standard' and a negative effect for the alternatives, in his near-hagiography of Gates & Co he simply missed the bigger picture that the lamosity of the Wintel platform's inherent legacy issues is and was a countervening force.

5-10% of the total market is sufficiently large for Apple, given a) it's the top 5-10% and b) Micros~1 continues to [stink] as it always has.

I found Carlton's book to be well-written, stimulating and unbiased. It seems that other reviewers feel that Carlton was flat wrong in his prediction that Apple will ultimately not succeed (he devotes only a few pages at the end to this). To these individuals, I suggest that you reread the book. Carlton did not say that Apple has always been a complete failure. His book was about how the company, which was YEARS ahead of others in terms of technology and design, lost its market share. His prediction is simply that Apple will most likely not thrive in the LONG-term.

To those who thought that Carlton's book was overly negative: What else could you call what happened to Apple? A success story? Of course not. Apple DID create an unbelievable company with brilliant design, technology and marketing. But the tragedy is that it chose to ride on its past successes without devising a strategic plan to maintain its lead in the ever-changing technology industry.

I suggest that anyone interested in learning how to manage a company over the long-haul read this book.

Apple Confidential tells it like it was-very impartial, newsy, and informative.

While it was a very easy read, it was full of all sorts of juicy tidbits that complete a history. I'm talking about the kind of things that you know in your heart have to be going on at a large company, but somehow have been sanitized and bleached until all that hits the public is a "whitebread" version of the truth (Jobs and Woz were best friends who wanted to change the world, yadda, yadda, yadda....).

Newp, not here-in Apple Confidential we get inside the heads of the people who through a very serendipitous fate, influenced the computing industry and just the way it happened.

Anybody who would like to re-live those amazing times needs to read this book, either cover to cover, or just picking out a random chapter at a time. It was truly fascinating, and Mr. Linzmayer managed to overcome the admittedly short attention span of this reader for hours on end.

Buy this book

This is hands down the best book ever written about Apple computer. I read the entire thing in one sitting, and started re-reading the really good bits the next day. Newton aficionados will particularly enjoy the chapter relating to the the worlds first PDA. My knowledge of the history of that little device more than doubled. Also enjoyable is the chapter dedicated to the signatures found inside the case of early Macs. Each signature is reproduced along with information about each person, both at the time of the Mac's development, as well as his or her current whereabouts. The pictures, and sidebar quotes help make this book a real can't-put-down-page-turner. I've read many books relating to Apple and the Macintosh, but this one has earned a place of honor in my technology library.

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!