Two guys named Steve, working in a garage, created a prototype computer designed to be different in a way no one thought possible: It would be easy to use. Those two Steves, one now a billionaire and still at the head of Apple, not only succeeded with that product, but they also broke ground in the business world in ways few thought possible: They proved you could not only have fun at work, but pursuing a capitalist dream could be hip. How did Apple do it? How did it go from making computers that made a difference but not much of a dent in the overall market to creating a device (the iPod) and a music service (iTunes) that has changed the way we buy and experience music? And how did the Macintosh and its successors capture the hearts and minds of computer users so deeply that being a Mac person makes you a member of a special club? That's what this book is all about. As author Jason D. O'Grady shows, Apple is a rare company—one that is not afraid to think about a future that does not exist and turn it into reality. Critics have written Apple off time and again, yet it rises from the ashes to astound the critics and delight its customers. That's not luck or happenstance—it's vision, dedication, and persistence. Besides delighting Apple aficionados, this book will inspire students eager to launch a business career or work in the technology sector. Apple has never been afraid to chart its own path, and readers will learn what makes the company tick.

Inside Apple reveals the secret systems, tactics and leadership strategies that allowed Steve Jobs and his company to churn out hit after hit and inspire a cult-like following for its products. If Apple is Silicon Valley's answer to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, then author Adam Lashinsky provides readers with a golden ticket to step inside. In this primer on leadership and innovation, the author will introduce readers to concepts like the "DRI" (Apple's practice of assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task) and the Top 100 (an annual ritual in which 100 up-and-coming executives are tapped a la Skull & Bones for a secret retreat with company founder Steve Jobs). Based on numerous interviews, the book offers exclusive new information about how Apple innovates, deals with its suppliers and is handling the transition into the Post Jobs Era. Lashinsky, a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune, knows the subject cold: In a 2008 cover story for the magazine entitled The Genius Behind Steve: Could Operations Whiz Tim Cook Run The Company Someday he predicted that Tim Cook, then an unknown, would eventually succeed Steve Jobs as CEO. While Inside Apple is ostensibly a deep dive into one, unique company (and its ecosystem of suppliers, investors, employees and competitors), the lessons about Jobs, leadership, product design and marketing are universal. They should appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of that Apple magic to their own company, career, or creative endeavor.

From the New York Times' Tripp Mickle, the dramatic, untold story inside Apple after the passing of Steve Jobs by following his top lieutenants—Jony Ive, the Chief Design Officer, and Tim Cook, the COO-turned-CEO—and how the fading of the former and the rise of the latter led to Apple losing its soul. Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his “spiritual partner at Apple.” The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs’s spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator’s death, the chief designer wrestled with grief and initially threw himself into his work designing the new Apple headquarters and the Watch before losing his motivation in a company increasingly devoted more to margins than to inspiration. In many ways, Cook was Ive’s opposite. The product of a small Alabama town, he had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company. His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize a margin, squeezing some suppliers, persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions. Jobs selected Cook as his successor, and Cook oversaw a period of tremendous revenue growth that has lifted Apple’s valuation to $2 trillion. He built a commanding business in China and rapidly distinguished himself as a master politician who could forge global alliances and send the world’s stock market into freefall with a single sentence. Author Tripp Mickle spoke with more than 200 current and former Apple executives, as well as figures key to this period of Apple’s history, including Trump administration officials and fashion luminaries such as Anna Wintour while writing After Steve. His research shows the company’s success came at a cost. Apple lost its innovative spirit and has not designed a new category of device in years. Ive’s departure in 2019 marked a culmination in Apple’s shift from a company of innovation to one of operational excellence, and the price is a company that has lost its soul.

Apple Computer was once a shining example of the American success story. Having launched the personal computer revolution in 1977 with the first all-purpose desktop PC, Apple became the darling of the national business press and Wall Street. Yet by 1995, the company's change-the-world idealism had all but disappeared in a bitter internal struggle between warring camps. Raging internal mistakes, petty infighting, and gross mismanagement became Apple's hallmark, and today the company clings to a mere 3.7 percent share of the market it helped to create. Apple is the spellbinding account of what really went on behind closed doors, revealing the forces that dismantled this once great icon of American business.

Subtitle on spine: The insanely great story of how the Mac was made.

Chronicles the best and the worst of Apple Computer's remarkable story.