I think it's weird that Apple's first few products - which were definitely world-changing - have so many stories around them, but the iPhone, which is arguably a waaaay more influential device, has none that I've seen.
It’s wonderful that Hertzfeld et al are willing share so much great technical and personal information about their time in that Apple era. This is the kind of stuff that people like us who read sites like this love.
I fear that similar stories of the modern era will be forever buried under the threat of lawsuits from violating NDAs and that’s a real shame. Stories like this need to be told.
The iPhone is many orders of magnitude more complex. It took thousands of engineers to design and build it, each working on a tiny piece. Entire subsystems (e.g. the modem chip) are wholly outsourced to other companies. There are no people who understand fully how more than a small piece of it works. The yield is a series of sprint planning meetings.
Apple was also a much smaller company then, steeped in the (unthinkable today) openness of 70s/80s compute culture. Apple itself grew out of the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist meetup where people swapped designs and technical information freely.
"Doing interesting engineering things with computer designs" was perceived as a very small niche of purely technical interest to a few geeks and nerds. The culture around the engineering wasn't at all locked down with NDAs and battallions of lawyers - why bother, the economic value of the technical information was seen as marginal and not worth bothering over. How times change!
Many of those people still work there, and those product lines are still being sold.
Also, if you like folklore.org, you should check out Alex St. John's stories about Windows 95. He's a bit of an unreliable narrator, but his stories are really interesting
https://web.archive.org/web/20160305165801/http://www.alexst...