It's no coincidence that the narrator of Douglas Coupland's novel Microserfs lists one of his seven dream categories in a game of Jeopardy! as being ' The history of Apple'.

No other company has aroused such interest, such passions, and certainly I can't think of any other company that would cause me to plough through a 584 page business tome in about four days flat.

Having now garnered three popular books on everyone's favourite dysfunctional corporate family, I think it's time to compare their relative merits...

First off, and in many ways still mt favourite, is Steven Levy's Insanely Great. Doubt may now be cast of some of the detail (more on that in a moment), but I have to say that hardly matters. This is an incredibly good read, in fact easily as gripping as Mr Coupland's excellent Microserfs. It was written to mark the 10th anniversary of the Macintosh, and only really covers the genesis and early history of that machine, but the writing is so good as to be indispensible for any Apple addict.

Michael Malone criticises him for painting too rosy a picture, but he does at least make it clear that Steve Jobs was utterly anti-Mac until he realised that the Lisa would fail and then he hijacked the project. Malone also complains that this book lacks an index - which is slightly odd as my Penguin edition seems to have one... Levy is not blind to the Mac's faults either, and there's a great bit near the end where he looks back to the typewriter age: "I never spent the whole morning installing a new ribbon. Nor did I subscribe to RemingtonWorld and IBM Selectric User. I did not attend the Smith-Corona Expo twice a year..." Very funny, and very true.

Formerly the Mac Bathroon Reader, now re-hashed for some reason as Apple Confidential, Owen W. Linzmayer's book is a bit of a disappointment. It's something of a cut-and-paste job, but it is at least illustrated, unlike the other two book reviewed here - although some of the illustrations, like the NeXT screen-shot, appear twice. Nice to see photos of the Canon Cat, the Xerox Alto and a Lisa screen-shot (although I'm still waiting for a Xerox Alto screen shot from somewhere - this is the almost mythical machine that supposedly inspired the Mac's WIMP interface, and I would love to see just how similar they really are.)

It really should have kept its original title, as this is a book for flicking through at random rather than reading from start to finish - to do that is to drive yourself slightly crazy. It's also full of graphs and 'timelines' that are next to useless. Still, worth considering for the excellent trivia, the pictures and odd insights I'd not heard about elsewhere - like the fact that Apple turned down the chance to buy AOL, the company that now owns Netscape and Time-Warner. Big bad blunder indeed...

And finally, Michael Malone's Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World's most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane. A hefty tome, 584 pages with not one illustration. Admittedly I was in the illest phase of chicken pox when I read most of this, but it's a bloody depressing book. With the gift of hindsight, Malone trashes, ridicules and generally pisses on every single CEO Apple has ever had. I can imagine Spindler, Amelio, Sculley et al turning up at Malone's house one day to casually enquire, with the help of some baseball bats, exactly what he would have done at the time.

Malone also has a habit of annoyingly contradicting himself in the space of a few pages, as if an editor really needed to re-check at least the early part of the book which details, on the whole very well, the pre-IBM PC, pre-Mac world of personal computing.

For a book that is so picky about getting facts right - chewing out Robert X Cringely and others - it contains a fair few mistakes that I spotted. For example, I'd always assumed DOS stood for disk operating system, not digital operating system, my iMac is Bondai blue, not Banzai blue, and it also has a 56k modem even though it was bought on launch day - Malone says the first iMacs only had a 33.6k modem - so much for your trumpeted fact checker, Mr Malone!

Still, I can't deny this book is excellent value for money, delving far deeper into the corporate shenaningans at Apple Computer, and covering a far longer period than any other book. The key shockers for me were his assertion that the whole Jobs 'Road to Damascus'-style coversion on a visit to Xerox Parc never happened, his duping of Woz over the Atari money for Breakout and his initial refusal to accept paternity of his daughter Lisa. I knew about the last two already, but reading them again in such detail made me want to scream 'asshole!' at Jobs if I ever met him. Which of course, I wouldn't. Oh hello, Mr Jobs, I'm a huge fan, no really, I have all of your computers, would you mind signing the base of my iMac keyboard, it's not for me it's for my son...

If you have to pack one of these books for the beach, go with Mr Levy's Insanely Great. It's the smallest, the happiest and reads like a good novel.