The original Inside Macintosh was quite decent. The main problem, I think, was that it was hard to understand just pieces of it; if you read it cover to cover i

The original Inside Macintosh was quite decent. The main problem, I think, was that it was hard to understand just pieces of it; if you read it cover to cover it was pretty good. But by the time Inside Macintosh VI rolled around with its 1750 pages to cover the System 7 additions, that approach had run its course. Apple then reorganized and rewrote the entire documentation along functional lines, producing separate, smaller, volumes for e.g. Memory, File Management, etc. That New Inside Macintosh series was, in my opinion, the highest quality documentation Apple ever produced.