Non-fiction 30 Nov 2003 17:18
Insanely Great
Insanely Great
Steven Levy
You probably shouldn’t read this book right after Silicon Boys, or you are bound to start confusing the books very soon after. There is a considerable intersection among them, which is not at all surprising.
This one, however, is all about Apple and, most important, the insanely great computer of the book’s title: the Macintosh. It does follow the whole history of the company, though, starting from the early days, way before Woz’s garage. And the good thing is that the author makes no attempt to make both Steve’s look like infallible heroes: they are shown very much like they really are, with their virtues and faults like those of every normal person.
I admit that I have never owned a Mac, or even an Apple II, but it is my constant consumer dream. Apple computers are not only powerful and useful, they are also elegant, beautiful in fact. You look at one and you can’t help wanting to own the thing. And this book shows how this reflects Jobs’s devotion to detail, to perfection. Macs are computers that are designed to be almost pieces of art, and this comes from the very early days of Apple’s history.
Of course, not everything is flowers in the history of Apple, and this is shown in detail in the book as well. Apple lived through some very rough periods in its history, and some of them were undoubtably caused by the same person who gave Apple most of its personality, Steve Jobs.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone who has been bitten by the Apple bug, whether they actually use a Mac or not. It’s a very easy to read book (I read it in one day), and the story is told in detail. It’s a great picture of the early days of Silicon Valley as well.
