Customer Reviews
Most Helpful
2 out of 5 stars
By
D. Saguy
on
04-04-14
A huge let down
What would have made Haunted Empire better?
I work in the mobile space and I invest in Apple stock so Apple is very central to my work and income. And as everyone knows, Apple is one of the most secretive large companies on the planet so for the past 5 years, I've been reading every single book or news story that comes out about Apple to try and keep up with what is really going on inside. But so far most books have been either about Steve Jobs or about Apple while Steve Jobs was still alive. So when I heard about this book, I just could not wait to read it. Great title, great promise of finally finding out whether Apple's still got it.
But that's pretty much when the excitement ended.
The book is full of assertions or doubts raised frivolously like whether Johnny Ive is really as talented or essential as everyone says BUT with no facts or even stories to back up the assertions. You're left wondering where the author got these impressions from and why she's so sure.
Some of these assertions are completely contradictory to the recent book about Jony Ive: "Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products" which is excellently researched and wonderfully written (although the narrator has a somewhat annoying voice on Audible).
Even the author's thesis that Apple has lost its way is contradicted by the author herself at many points in the book. So the impression you're left with is that of a long boring narrative of events, which I had already read about in the news, peppered with assertions that don't hold together.
So to conclude, I hope that someone will write a book about the Tim Cook era at Apple that actually reads well and isn't full of obvious bias so readers can make their own opinions. Unfortunately that book has not yet been written.
Did Arielle DeLisle do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?
The narrator does a decent job but it's pointless because the book is such a joke in the first place.
Read More
Hide me
12 of 15 people found this review helpful
1 out of 5 stars
By
dan pflaum
on
11-04-15
Don't just hate on apple, tell the story
It is clear that in the eyes of this author Apple can do no good. The book doesn't talk about Apple after Jobs, rather it talks about how terrible he was and that Apple is even more hopeless now without him.
The book is also now out of dat to the new changes and was wrong on some of its predictions
Read More
Hide me
1 of 1 people found this review helpful