I’ll cut to the chase, here are some of the top Apple secrets (at least for me) that are revealed in Inside Steve Jobs:

- The new interface for the Mas OS X was prototyped using Macromedia Director in just 3 weeks. Steve Jobs was so impressed he told the Senior Designer Ratzlaff he believed he had an IQ of over 100.

- Jobs went around Silicon Valley’s top design firms to come up with a new case for the Apple II, which refused to take stock in Apple for doing the work. Jobs gave the work to Jerry Manock, a freelance designer who’d left HP and needed work.

- Pixar, the famous animation studio, was created by Steve Jobs after he left Apple Computers in 1985. In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated 3D movie. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 for the sum of $7.4 billion.

- At San Francisco’s Moscone Center, the Apple Booth is shrouded in a twenty-foot high black curtain. Everything inside the curtain is also wrapped, even the MacWorld Presentation stage. The building is protected 24/7 by guards. Google wants to keep its secrets until the last minute!

- At Apple, everyone is scared of losing their jobs. Steve Jobs is extremely demanding of the people that work for him. This constant state of fear is known as the “hero / asshole rollercoaster”. One day you’re a hero, the other you’re an asshole.

- In recent years, everytime a major product has been completed at Apple, Steve Jobs decides to generously give away one copy to each member of staff. This includes the iPod Shuffles to each employee and the complimentary iPhone in 2007 (21,600 iPhones given away on total).

- Apple employees say “like many people, I tried to avoid him as much as possible” about Steve Jobs. If you walk in front of Steve’s office, who knows what will happen to you, you might even get fired!

- Steve is a militant vegan. One employee even changes from his leather shoes to canvas sneakers to go meet Steve Jobs, as he would not tolerate any form of animal skin in his office.

- The Cube, a beautifully designed, technically advanced Mac G4 machine was one of Steve Job’s technological babies, which he launched in July 2001. It was the wrong machine at the wrong time and the first mistake of Apple’s CEO since he had joined the company. Steve Jobs was stung.

- [Quote from the book, p194] : When it comes to innovation, Jobs is fond of quoting Picasso’s famous dictum: good artists copy, great artists steal. To which Jobs adds: “And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas”.

That’s it! But there are lots more interesting facts about Apple and Steve Jobs in the book, so I highly recommend investing in a copy to find out more excitings insights on the company and its cofounder.