Mini-review: David Pogue's Apple: The First 50 Years

I almost never buy e-books, but I decided to spring for an electronic copy of David Pogue's Apple: The First 50 Years to see if I even wanted to bother with the hardcover. Previously the essential tome on Apple (and especially Mac) history was Owen Linzmeyer's Apple Confidential, still on my shelf in the well-thumbed 2.0 paperback. I was prepared to find this book lightweight on the technical side and I expected that it would concentrate far more on Apple the electronics company than Apple the computer company (after all, the cover's a big flippin' clickwheel). I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. While I'm much less interested in the history of Apple after, say, the Intel transition (because I'm still bitter), over half the book's 540-odd content pages are dedicated to Apple prior to Jobs' 1997 return.

For example, relevant to our recent article, Pogue provides a solid discussion of the Apple-1 (including the little-known Computer Conversor 4000) and a lot of nice period photographs of Jobs and Woz working on it. The Apple III segment is extremely well-written, with even a thermal photo of just how hot that darn thing ran, plus a complex discussion of the Lisa and of course many pages on Jef Raskin and the early Macintosh. Later on, there's a decent section on Copland and its technical aspects that isn't just a rehash of the Wikipedia article, whereas Linzmeyer mostly considers it from the perspective of the events leading to Jobs' return, and Pogue also gives a small but pithy ELI5 on OpenDoc as well. Pogue even has a picture of the iguana iguana powersurgius image embedded in the PowerSurge and Apple Network Server ROMs, and some interesting photographs of early design prototypes of Spartacus, or what would become the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. While Pogue doesn't speak much about the Apple Network Server, our favourite Apple system here at Floodgap (because one of them used to serve Floodgap), he at least namedrops it along with the cancelled Power Mac 9700, though oddly he completely omits any mention of the Workgroup Servers (on the other hand, while Linzmeyer provides the codenames for these systems, neither the 9700 nor "Power Express" appear in the earlier text).

Another notable chapter is "Moonshots" (chapter 21). This is aggravatingly brief, but if you ever wanted to see the Cray that John Sculley bought to design the Aquarius RISC chip, you can see it there (love the purple), along with a nice picture of the Jaguar mockup. Kaleida and Taligent get short perfunctory mentions, but they didn't get a lot of print in Owen's text either, and of course Star Trek gets a decent sidebar. The prototype photographs, in fact, are probably the best reason to buy the book. There's a nice photo of the TIM mockup (a corruption of "Time To Market") which used a Macintosh Portable to run the show, but was in fact the design prototype for the PowerBook 100. On the other hand, Pogue calls Gary Davidian's early 68K emulator Cognac, but I don't think this is correct: the emulator was part of the RLC ("RISC LC") project, and that was codenamed Cognac, the renegade group in Apple led by Jack McHenry. Pogue also doesn't mention McHenry nor the RLC's architecture (originally the doomed Motorola 88100, the "other white meat"), nor that there were other RLC-like systems based on MIPS and ARM, though I don't know if Davidian's emulator actually ever ran on those. For his part Linzmeyer has a single mention of Cognac, which he lists as the codename for the "Power Mac project."

Other landmarks abound. There is an entire chapter on Newton as well, including a picture of the Cadillac prototype (hi Greg!) with its diffuse infrared system for room-wide data transfer, and which the earlier book doesn't even mention. Pogue also includes the Interactive Television Box, albeit briefly, and a longer bit on the PenLite, two oddball projects similarly missing from Owen's text. In fact, the book even talks about the Swatch project, reportedly based on the Sony PTC-300 PDA and effectively a Mac in a Newton-sized form factor, with colour pictures. The Apple clone manufacturers get their own special section; while Linzmeyer has a more detailed chapter "The Clone Quandary," Pogue's "Clones" is pithier and easier to follow. Apple 1990's gadget hounds will like the QuickTake section and pictures of the PowerCD, AppleDesign Powered Speakers (I still use a set with my 7300) and even the Apple combo Mac/fax. There's a nice colour screenshot of eWorld, though Owen's coverage is better, a sidebar on Magic Cap, though I also favour Owen's, and a portion on the Pippin.

When Jobs came back, the book got less interesting for me, and I sort of idly paged my way to the end. I don't think there's a lot there people haven't seen, and I was surprised that the famous picture of the Yosemite G3 acting as an iPhone prototype wasn't in the book. He has so many other great pictures you'd think he could manage that one (there is an interesting picture of the creeptastic Face Lab, though). The last couple chapters of the book are so speculative as to be almost useless, which Linzmeyer to his credit didn't even try to address, knowing that the company's history was far from settled.

Still, having gone over it electronically, I think I want this in my bookshelf too and I'm going to pick up the hardcover after all. I see some names in the back who have been good friends of this blog in the past and I think that in general is a good testimony of its accuracy and relevance (my brief quibbles above notwithstanding), and as far as the writing style goes, Pogue has always been able to spin a good tech yarn. If he ever decides to do a more detailed dive into it, I'd probably pay decent money since he knows the right people to talk to — I don't know if it would sell but if it's on the order of the quality here, he'd get my bread in a minute. Until that happens, check this one out and see if you agree.