Review of the book "Infinite Loop" (original) (raw)
14 June 99
Unsolicited review for fatbrain.com of the book
Infinite Loop : How Apple, the World's Most Insanely Great Computer
Company, Went Insane
By Malone, Michael S.by Paul Heckbert Carnegie Mellon University, ph@cs.cmu.edu
An interesting book on the history of Apple Computer. The beginning of the book (Apple's early years) is quite a page-turner.
I thought the book was too long (almost 600 pages) and would have been much better if it had been edited down to half its length. The stories, particularly toward the beginning of the book, of the backgrounds of Wozniak and Jobs, and their early years, were penetrating in their discussions of the technology (Apple II, Mac) and personalities, but in the Sculley-Spindler-Amelio years, the stories dwell on the comings and goings of the top executives and consequently get rather boring.
The book is poorly edited, containing repetitive material, and excessive detail tangential to the main story. Perhaps this is a consequence of compiling the book mainly from San Jose Mercury News stories (the author cites as his main source) rather than from interviews with the main actors. The first few hundred pages were the best; the last 100 the weakest.
The writing has a myopic flavor to it, I thought: paragraphs or sections attempt to be complete stories, re-stating the causes, excessively foreshadowing the long-term effects, as if the writer is not patient enough to to let the reader wait to read the consequences a chapter later. Also, the book uses so many superlatives that it almost seems that every other month at Apple was their best month or their worst month. Sure, Apple was a rollercoaster, but all this exaggeration gets quite tiresome.
Some other omissions: no pictures! no timeline, no discussion of MacPaint or MacDraw or Quicktime VR, very little discussion of the Web. There was too much focus on (boring) executives and hardware, and too little attention to the technical wizards at Apple (Wozniak, Raskin, and a few others were covered), nothing on Apple's excellent User Interface Group, too little on software.
In spite of these criticisms, I'd still recommend it as an interesting book about a fascinating company! I haven't read any other books on Apple history, so I can't compare it to others, however.