Apple Confidential

With Apple’s success over the past few years and the ever-increasing number of posts related to Apple on Tumblr, it amazes me that more people haven’t come across this book, by Owen Linzmayer. In my opinion, Apple has probably the most fascinating history out of any company in the past fifty years, and this book covers so much of it. Some of the more interesting pieces that haven’t been widely publicized:

  • Apple ported their system software to Intel processors long before the Core Duo era (think 486 era, long before OS X)
  • The iPhone’s predecessor (the Newton) was killed off by Steve Jobs upon his return to Cupertino (lots of interesting things with that project)
  • Apple—at one time—owned a substantial portion of America Online, starting shortly after Quantum renamed itself America Online. Apple sold this stock in 1996 for a profit of $39 million. They hold on for another three years, those same shares would have brought in $24.5 billion. (p. 149)
  • Steve Jobs really was a complete and total asshole, screwing over even his “good friend” Woz

And then there’s some choice quotations as well, like this one from Steve Jobs (p. 176):

The day I left Apple we had a 10-year lead over Microsoft. In the technology business a 10-year lead is really hard to come by… Apple had that with the graphical user interface. The problem at Apple was that they stopped innovating. If you look at the Mac that ships today, it’s 25 percent different than the day I left. And that’s not enough for 10 years and billions of dollars in R&D. It wasn’t that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac, it’s that the Mac was a sitting duck for ten years. That’s Apple’s problem: their differentiation evaporated.

An interesting thought, particularly given what I stated in an earlier post. It would be good for Steve Jobs to remember his own words, I think, going forward with the Mac and OS X.

I bought this book back in 2004, and I still read bits and pieces of it quite often. If you have any interest in Apple stuff, it’s a great read, bordering on necessary.

Notes