Owen Linzmayer has been covering Apple as a journalist since the early 1980s. After reading just about everything written by or about the company, going through previously unexamined corporate archives, and interviewing the key players, he has put together this entertaining, well-rounded history. You can't label this an expose, but it does a good job of presenting the bad along with the good. Linzmayer was determined not to "rehash old myths and repeat conventional wisdom." Indeed, from its first sentence, the book offers revelations:

"Thanks to a never-ending campaign by Apple's powerful public relations machine to protect the myths surrounding the company's origin, almost everyone believes that Apple was started in a garage by 'the two Steves,' Stephen Gary Wozniak, 25, and Steven Paul Jobs, 21. Actually, the operation began in a bedroom at 11161 Crist Drive in Los Altos (the house number changed to 2066 when the land was annexed from the county to the city in late 1983), where Jobs--after having dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon--was living with his adoptive parents, Paul R. (a machinist at Spectra Physics) and Clara (a payroll clerk at Varian). That mere semantic distinction can be forgiven. When the bedroom became too crowded, the operation did indeed move to the garage.

"The bigger story here is that the two Steves weren't alone in forming Apple. Just as Soviet propagandists doctored photos to remove party members who had fallen out of favor, Apple suffers from a convenient case of institutional amnesia by routinely ignoring the fact that when Apple was originally founded as a partnership on April Fools' Day 1976, there were three founders: Woz, Jobs, and a fellow by the name of Ronald Gerald Wayne, 41."

This bit of hidden corporate history is accompanied by a rare photo of Apple's forgotten cofounder, taken from his passport.

From there, the author continues to tell it like it is (or was). He reveals the real reason that the original Apple I was priced at $666.66, a fact that alarmed fundie Christians. He reproduces Apple's original logo, which was designed by Wayne and used for less than a year. President of Apple Products, Jean-Louis Gassee, comments on the most famous logo--the rainbow Apple. "One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn't dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy." Linzmayer looks at some of the most disastrous corporate decisions ever made: When they developed the first Apple prototype, Jobs and Wozniak were employees of Hewlett-Packard and Atari, respectively. Each man tried to convince his employer to produce the Apple, but both corporations turned them down.

Another chapter looks at the calamitous Apple III, about which Apple employee #6, Randy Wigginton, said: "The Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived during an orgy, and [later] everybody had this bad headache and there's this bastard child, and everyone says, 'It's not mine.'" In the chapter "Code Names Uncovered", we find out the reasoning behind the code names for products such as the PowerMac 7100/66 (Carl Sagan), Powerbook Duo (BOB W), AppleShare 3.0 (Killer Rabbit), and the Newton MessagePad 130 (called Dante, "after the author of the Inferno, because creating it was a project from hell.").

Speaking of Newton, Linzmayer devotes a whole chapter to the pioneering Personal Data Assistant, from initial concept through its crash and burn. "Almost 11 years after the Newton project was initiated, and after spending an estimated half-billion dollars on its development and marketing, Apple had managed to sell only 150,000 to 300,000 Newton devices during four and a half years on the market. The profitless product became a lightning rod for criticism, pushed one engineer to suicide, and proved the undoing of a high-profile CEO and numerous vice presidents." Another chapter covers several lesser blunders, including the Macintosh Portable, the eWorld online service, and the "Test Drive a Macintosh" campaign.

Other topics covered include Breakout, the seminal Atari videogame created in four days by Woz and Jobs; Apple's IPO; the arrival of IBM's PC; the Lisa computer and Xerox's litigation over it; Jef Raskin, who created the Macintosh over the strenuous objections of Jobs; the story behind the legendary 1984 commercial; a timeline of Mac models; the rise and fall of John Sculley; Gilbert Amelio's "short and sour" tenure as Apple's CEO; Windows' imitation of the Mac operating system; Mac clones; lawsuits from Apple Records, Bob Dylan, and others; the people behind the raised plastic signatures on the inside back panels of early Macs; the triumphant return of Steve Jobs; and more. Unfortunately, because of the timing in completing the manuscript for Apple Confidential, the iMac only gets two pages at the very end of the book. The iBook and the mighty G4 were released even later, so they aren't mentioned at all. Hopefully, a future edition of this book will give us the tasty inside scoop about the development of these innovative computers.