This is a big colorful book by long-time tech and Apple author and commentator David Pogue. It covers, in mostly chronological order, the history of Apple as a company, and the evolution of Apple products.
Apple has had an outsized influence on the design of computers, cell phones and other electronic devices, and this book really makes you understand and remember that.
There was one page early on in the book, talking about the Apple I, where a lot of things went wrong. The text confused kilobytes with kilobits (KB vs Kb, the case matters!), RAM with ROM and bytes with kilobytes. The result was a page that made no sense to someone who was knowledgeable about computers.
Fortunately, I didn’t see any glaring errors on the other 600 pages, which I enjoyed tremendously.
There are a number of interesting and funny stories in the book, many that I hadn’t heard before.
Of course, there is the big story arc of Steve Jobs founding Apple, leaving, and eventually coming back to save the company from near disaster. I really hadn’t appreciated how dire the situation was at Apple in the 1990s until reading this book.
I was especially interested in a lot of the history of how our devices came to be the way they are. All laptop computers used to have the keyboard at the very front edge. Now, none of them do. How did that happen?
Computers didn’t have USB ports until Apple introduced them. Computers had floppy drives and CD drives until Apple removed them.
This is overall a great book for Apple fans.
Full disclosure: MacMAD received a review copy of this book.