Uncovering the Innovative History of the iPhone: The One Device

Charlotte Blauer: The book arrived in excellent condition. Thank you for packing it so well.
...and awesome book

United States on Sep 24, 2023

Frans: I still don't understand why this book has not been a superhit. It's my favorite innovation book, out of the hundreds that I've read. It's well researched, well written, and shows in an incredibly powerful way how innovation really works. 'How the sausage is made' is never the visionary CEO saying to the R&D department: design this! It's actually quite the opposite. So much for Steve Jobs the genius. In this book you will find the geniuses that actually made the iPhone and it's even more important software. Steve Jobs was a genius at getting brilliant people to work at Apple. If only he had been a little more humble and not take all the credit for their work.

Netherlands on Jan 05, 2023

marco meli: Come molte storie che riguardano Apple e Jobs in particolare, la narrativa è spesso spostata sulle azioni di Steve come influenzatore dei fatti. Questo libro è a mio parere più oggettivo, ed analizza il lavoro corale che è esistito in quella fucina di innovazioni che è stata Apple in quel periodo. Tutti noi, anche i concorrenti, dobbiamo riconoscere l'impatto che tale innovazioni hanno avuto. Leggetelo, se volete almeno intuire cosa c'è dietro alla creazione di un oggetto che ha cambiato il mondo

Italy on Aug 15, 2021

G.C.: I bought this book when it came out in July and have gone back and forth reading it. I'd read books on Silicon Valley before; the Apple eulogising Insanely Great by Steven Levy which told of the graft and hard work that went into the original Macintosh or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner & Lyon which discussed engineers exceeding long work hour culture. My favourite one is still Robert X Cringely's Accidental Empires that portrays Gates as a coupon-clipping megalomaniac and Steve Jobs as a sociopath cut from the same cloth as Josef Stalin.

Merchant's The One Device is different. It doesn't eulogise in the same way, but it also lacks immediacy as it feels detached from its subject matter. Unlike Levy's work, Apple didn't cooperate with Merchant at all. The book is broad in scope and sometimes loses its way, each one of the chapters could have been an interesting short book in their own right and this leaves it being faintly unsatisfactory.  I guess this is one of the reasons why it took me so long to read it.

In the meantime the book stirred controversy over quotes attributed to Tony Fadell about then colleague Phil Schiller.  This made me cast a...

United Kingdom on Oct 30, 2017

Jacob van Houdt: Rather disappointing, as I had expected a more thorough overview of the history of the smartphone over the 20 years leading up to 2007. Xerox PARC is barely mentioned whereas this has been quite instrumental in many respects. General Magic is not even mentioned once, whereas they (with major players like Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld) were of enormous importance, as a spin out from Apple in 1992 with John Sculley on the board. Obviously, the company was far ahead of his time or rather of the state of technology, but the Magic Cap agent is now being realised some 20 years later. And one could argue that Telescript failed because of the fee Internet that started around the same time, but in hindsight the free internet with its current abuse in spam and terrorism enabling is sort of a major failure; if only the telecom companies would have been a little bit more forward looking.
Anyway, the book with a heavy chapter on the chemical analysis of its ingredients and its barely masked contempt for technological progress, is also disappointing because it fails to explain and expose how crucial the coming together of all technological basics like processing power, memory cost,...

United Kingdom on Sep 13, 2017

rotmanpr: You don't have to be an Apple geek to love this book but it helps. Someone who uses another type of smartphone (is there such a thing)? might also wonder how the device requires a book-length treatment. Can't see anyone digging into "The Story of the Motorola RAZR). However, Merchant's achievement is substantial and is a superior piece of writing--flawless in its own way. It's also a very impressive piece of research. Given Apple's secrecy mania, he extracted about as much or more than can be expected from sources inside the company. As the iPhone did change the world one would think someone at Apple might want to have some of it on the record even if provided anonymously. Most fascinating were all the convergent technologies percolating on the world stage that came together on the admittedly flawed first product. Even with the iPhone, it took some time to get it right. I enjoyed this book immensely and look at the device in my hand which is always in my pocket, now somewhat supplanted by my AppleWatch, and think I understand and appreciate it that much more due to Merchant's book. He achieved something wise and necessary. A very worthwhile purchase for those keen on technology,...

Canada on Aug 27, 2017

stingray: I was really looking forward to reading The One Device(on that later) My takeaways are a person never realized how many people had something to do with the making of the iPhone. We give the credit to Steve Jobs and he deserves it with his vision, leadership and most of all his blessings-the iconic iPhone would have never been build. And yet, he fought and had to be persuaded to build a phone, open the App Store, have iTunes in windows and that was not easy as he was the boss, a jerk and a force of nature. The scope of hands that contributed to the iPhone is incredible from the miners in Chille getting the raw material for the lithium batteries, to the hands of brilliant engineers and designers at Apple, to all the past inventions notably multitouch,to WiFi, to chips and so on without them the iPhones will have not been possible.
Is an incredible read but my disappointment was the writer Merchant writing style-it wasn't easy to read , he goes way to deep into the weeds(way too much details ) it almost feels like a textbook. I like nonfiction books to feel like fiction, a story with plots, with transition and connecting points and even a little cliff hangers. At the end I rushed...

United States on Jul 21, 2017

satkinsn: This is as close as tech journalism - a genre not noted for its toughness - gets to being heroic. Brian Merchant goes to great lengths to exhaustively document both how the iPhone came to be, and how it is made. Along the way, he disposes of a bunch of myths about the iPhone's origins (no, it didn't spring from Steve Jobs' fevered brow) and finds an even better creation story. He sneaks into the plant where iPhones are made, investigates the source of the rare materials inside the phones, adds up the human cost of these gadgets. He gets a street tech to make him an iPhone out of spare parts. He is clear-eyed about these little computers, their good and bad. And when the book is over, he details exactly how he got the story, who he talked to, when and why.

It's not perfect - no first draft of history is. There's a weird side-trip about cell phones and apps in Africa that feels like it belongs in a different book. And as other reviewers have noted, the narrative is a bit...fragmentary, though I think that's less a bug than a feature. And here's the thing: as important as smart phones are, there's almost no good writing about them available to the general public. This is a...

United States on Jul 15, 2017

Ashutosh S. Jogalekar: Isaac Newton's quote about standing on the shoulders of giants applies to science as well as technology. No technology arises in a vacuum, and every technology is in some sense a cannibalized hybrid of versions of it that came before. Unlike science, however, technology suffers from a special problem: that of mass appeal and massive publicity, usually made possible by one charismatic individual. Because of the myth-weaving associated with it, technology even more than science can thus make make us forget its illustrious forebears.

Brian Merchant's book on the origin story of the iPhone is a good example of both these aspects of technological innovation. It was the culmination of dozens of technical innovations going back decades, most of which are now forgotten. And it was also sold to the public as essentially the brainchild of one person - Steve Jobs. This book should handily demolish that latter myth.

Merchant's book takes us into both the inside of the iPhone as well as the inside of the technically accomplished team at Apple that developed the device. He shows us how the idea of the iPhone came about through fits and starts, even as concepts from many different...

United States on Jul 07, 2017