Product Reviews

Apple Confidential is the fourth book about Apple to appear in the past 18 months alone - a quite remarkable phenomenon among computer makers.

Unlike the last three books about Apple, which were all apocalyptic business studies proclaiming Apple's impending doom, this is relatively upbeat, and approaches the Apple story from the point of view of a Mac aficionado. For example, Apple Confidential uses the same paperback format as your common-or-garden Peachpit software manual. The easy-to-read pages are annotated with copious quotes from key players down the margins, and there are plenty of charts, pages devoted to timelines, and reprints of original source material, such as the numerous resignation letters of the various Apple CEOs.

Best of all, the book is packed with rare photographs of all the key players in the Apple story, along with old adverts, screenshots of seminal programs, and venerable old machines like the original Xerox Alto - the inspiration for the Mac. The last book on Apple, Michael Malone's Infinite Loop, had no pictures whatsoever.

Another thing which makes Apple Confidential different is its structure: author Owen Linzmayer eschews any chronology in his account, and instead each chapter concentrates on a topic which he thinks is interesting or pertinent to the Apple story.

Chapters are dedicated to major events such as 'The Making of Macintosh', 'The Clone Quandary' and 'The Copland Crisis', as well as more hobbyist topics like 'Code Names Uncovered' (the code names given to every single product Apple released) and 'Macintosh Insiders' (a chapter filled with signatures of the original Mac development team, alongside brief accounts of their subsequent lives).

This approach, combined with Linzmayer's economic writing style, is effective in getting to the point behind such Byzantine sagas as Bill Gates' dual role as Mac supporter and Mac destroyer, and the whole 'Star Trek' saga, in which Apple worked on an Intel version of the Mac OS. Perhaps Linzmayer was right to avoid recounting every meeting, the resulting decisions and subsequent revisions made by Apple's executives, which have weighed down the other books on Apple and made them less readable.

Linzmayer's somewhat random choice of chapter subjects and story order means he doesn't have to produce a narrative

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with a start and a conclusion - something which has immediately dated other Apple books. After all, the Apple story is far from over.

On the other hand, one gets the sense that Linzmayer has not told the 'Real Story of Apple' as promised in the title, but merely produced a compilation of the stories he found most interesting. For example, while the events, people, technologies and motivations behind the creation of the Mac are well covered, Linzmayer ignores the fact that it was Adobe, Aldus and the DTP revolution that were crucial to making the Mac platform a success.

Yet Linzmayer finds room in his book to dedicate a whole chapter to 'Trademark Tiffs', which is filled with such 'vital' information as the fact that Apple lost $26 million in a court battle with the Beatles' Apple Corporation, and that the Beatles' lawyer suggested Apple rename itself Banana or Peach.

Linzmayer's non-chronological approach can also be confusing. Steve Jobs has returned to Apple six chapters before the 'Copland Crisis' chapter tells of how Apple nearly bought Be OS instead of Jobs' NeXT to replace the ill-fated Copland. But then who's to say that Apple's executives were any less confused at the time.

The amount of original source material in the book is impressive: Bill Gates' famous 1985 letter telling Apple to license the Mac OS is here in full, and there's even the full text of Big Brother's gibberish speech in the famous 1984 advertisement. Oddly enough, some of it is reminiscent of a poor section of one of ex-Apple CEO Gil Amelio's speeches.

The section containing all the original IT press reviews that greeted the Mac on its 1984 launch are revealing and refreshingly free of the 20:20 hindsight that afflicts so many technology books. A generally positive review in the July 1984 issue of Creative Computing made some criticisms of the Mac which might not have been out of place in an iMac review of last year: it laments the fact that 'PC compatibility is ruled out', 'there are no internal expansion slots', 'the Macintosh will not multitask', and 'Macintosh software development is an involved process'.

However, unlike previous Apple books, there are no sensational new revelations, such as the original revelation of Bill Gates' 1985 letter in Jim Carlton's Apple: The inside story, Amelio's astonishing account of his overthrow by Jobs in his own book, or even Malone's claims that Apple's first CEO was sacked because of his homosexuality.

On the other hand, Linzmayer's book will tell you how to find the Breakout arcade game hidden in System 7.5, and how to locate Killer Rabbit icons in System 7's file sharing folder.

Linzmayer's previous book about Apple was called The Mac Bathroom Reader, and this book is similarly best enjoyed as a cheap and cheerful title which can be dipped into at opportune moments, rather than as the definitive story of Apple Computer.