Apple The first 50 years

A richly illustrated history of the computer giant as it enters its sixth decade. Longtime tech journalist Pogue has been following Apple for a long while now, long enough that the legendary Steve Jobs once called him up, furious after a critical article, to say, "You have no idea what the fuck we do here at Apple, do you?" That was generally true of the rest of the world, too: Jobs was playing the longest of long games, and famed for both wrath and genius, he led Apple to extraordinary innovations: In 1991 the first Apple portable "revolutionized the fundamental form of a laptop"; 10 years later came the iPod, in which "to applause, Jobs announced: 'A thousand songs in your pocket.' To no applause, he mentioned the price: $400"; in 2004 his hardworking design team cooked up "the fundamental form of the modern iMac," the integrated desktop that began acrylic and became aluminum and will become who knows what. These things might not have happened without the relentless Jobs using his "reality-distortion field" to accomplish such impossibilities as convincing Corning to retool one of its factories to make scratchproof glass for the iPhone. Jobs has been long gone, and while his handpicked successor, Tim Cook, may have a somewhat gentler hand, he's an innovator, too, taking such daring risks as sinking billions into the development of Apple TV (though, as Pogue writes, "the company did have, after all, have $257 billion in cash"). Not everything the techies touch has turned out a golden apple under the sun (Newton or the first HomePod, anyone?), but the hits keep on coming, from the VisiCalc-equipped Apple II in 1979 to the latest generation of M-series chips. Just the thing for MacHeads, especially collectors of Apple goodies over the years. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.