The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone Hardcover – June 20, 2017

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 projects were finally merged into one. The initial goal was not a phone; Jobs finally made it one. But for most of the process Job was not involved, and one of the biggest contributions that the book makes is to highlight the names of many unsung engineers who both conceived the project and stuck with it through thick and thin.Merchant illuminates the pressure-cooker atmosphere at Apple that Jobs cultivated as well as his quest for perfection. Jobs comes across as an autocratic and curmudgeonly task master in the account; most of the innovations were not his, and people were constantly scrambling to avoid incurring his wrath, although that did not prevent him from being first on all the key patents. In some sense he seems to have hampered the development of the iPhone because of his mercurial and unpredictable personality. Nonetheless, he had a vision for the big picture and commanded an authority that none of the others did, and that vision was finally what made the device a reality. Merchant's doggedness in hunting down the true innovators behind the phone and getting them to talk to him - a constantly uphill battle in the face of Apple's ultra-secret culture - is to be commended. This is probably as much of an outsider's inside account as we are likely to get.The second part of the book is more interesting in many ways, because in this part Merchant dons the hat of investigative field reporter and crisscrosses the world in search of the raw materials that the phone is made up of. As a chemist I particularly appreciated his efforts. He surreptitiously sends a phone to a metallurgist who pulverizes it completely and analyzes its elemental composition; Merchant lovingly spends three pages listing the percentages of every element in there. His travels take him deep into a Bolivian mine called Cerro Rico which mines almost all the lithium that goes into the lithium-cobalt battery that powers the device. This mine, along with mines in other parts of South America and Africa which produce most of the metals found in the phone, often have atrocious safety records; many of the miners at Cerro Rico have average life expectancies of 40 years, and it's only the terrible standard of living that compels desperate job-seekers to try to make a quick buck here. Merchant also hunts down the father of the lithium-ion battery, John Goodenough (perpetual contender for a Nobel Prize), who gives him a tutorial not just on that revolutionary invention but on another, even more powerful sodium-powered batter that the 94-year-old chemist is working on.Merchant also explores the origin of the Gorilla Glass that forms the cover of the phone; that glass was the result of a late-stage, frenzied negotiation between Jobs and Corning. He leads us through the history of the gyroscopes, image stabilizing camera and accelerometers in the device, none of which were invented at Apple and all of which are seamlessly integrated into the system. And there is a great account of the transgender, maverick woman who massively contributed to the all-important ARM chip that is at the heart of the phone's operating system. Equally important is the encryption system which illustrates one of the great paradoxes of consumer technology: we want our data to be as secure as possible, and at the same time we also want to use technology in myriad ways in which we willingly give up our privacy. Finally, there is an important discussion of how the real innovation in the iPhone was not the iPhone at all - it was the App Store: only when third party developers got permission to write their own apps did sales soar (think Uber). That's a marketing lesson for the business school textbooks I believe.One of the most important - if not the most important - innovations in the iPhone is the multitouch display, and no other part of the phone illustrates how technology and ideas piggyback on each other. Contrary to popular wisdom, neither Steve Jobs nor Apple invented multitouch. It was in fact invented multiple times before over three decades; at particle physics lab CERN, at the University of Toronto, by a pioneering educator who wanted to make primitive iPad-like computers available to students, and finally, by a small company trying to make it easier for people with hand disabilities to operate computers. One of Apple's employees whose hand was sprained was seen wearing that device; it caught the eye of one of the engineers on the team, and the rest is history. Multitouch is the perfect example of how curiosity-based research gradually flows into useful technology, which then accidentally gets picked up by a giant corporation which markets it so well that we all misattribute the idea to the giant corporation.Another example of this technological usurpation is the basic idea of a smartphone, which again did not come from Apple at all. In fact this discussion takes Merchant into a charming sojourn into the nineteenth century when fanciful ideas about wireless telegraphy dotted the landscape of popular culture and science fiction; in one illustration from 1907, Punch Magazine anticipated the social isolation engendered by technology by showing a lady and her lover sitting next to each other but choosing to communicate through a fictional wireless telegraph. Like many other inventions, ideas about wireless communication had been "in the air" since Bell developed the telephone, and so the iPhone in a sense is only the logical culmination of this marketplace of ideas. The smart phone itself came from an engineer at IBM named Frank Canova. For a variety of reasons - most notably cost - Canova's device never took off, although if you look at it it appears to be an almost identical albeit primitive version of the iPhone.In the last part of the book, Merchant takes us on a trip to Foxconn, the world's largest electronics factory. Foxconn which is based in China is a city unto itself, and it's fascinating to have Merchant lead us through its labyrinthine and dimly-lit corridors, housing literally hundreds of thousands of workers whose toil reminds us of scenes from the underground city of Zion in the "Matrix" franchise. At one point Merchant makes an unauthorized excursion into forbidden parts of the factory and is amazed to see a landscape of manufacturing whose sheer scale seems to stretch on forever. The scenes are fascinating even if morbidly so; the working environment is brutal, the workers are constantly overworked and live in cramped quarters, and the suicides are so frequent that the authorities had to install nets in front of buildings to catch those who jumped from the top.In one sense everything - the Bolivian lithium salt mines with workers breathing noxious fumes and being paid in pennies, the iPhone scrap heaps in Africa over which eager counterfeiters drool, the dozen other odd sourcing companies for metals and plastics, the dizzying cornucopia of iPhone parts with their diverse history and the sweat and toil of countless unknown laborers in far-flung parts of the world struggling to produce this device, often under conditions that would be downright illegal in the United States - come together on that dimly lit factory floor in Foxconn to bring you the piece of technology on which you may be reading these words.You should never look at your phone the same way again.

Other Silicon Valley observers have written about the development of the iPhone—but it's unlikely that anyone else has delved as deeply into the subject as Brian Merchant . . . or will ever do so in the future, for that matter. Merchant's brilliant new book, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, tells the tale from the mining of the minerals from which the phone is crafted to the oppressive working conditions in Apple's Chinese manufacturing plants and the scavengers at Third World dumps where discarded iPhones are sometimes now found. Those topics bookend the story, which largely consists of interviews with some of the hundreds of people who played a hand in the phone's development.Steve Jobs didn't invent the iPhoneIf you have the impression that Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and is largely responsible for its success, The One Device will quickly disabuse you of that misconception. Without question, Jobs was hugely influential in the project: his obsessive attention to detail, his passion for secrecy, and his genius at marketing all contributed in major ways to the ultimate runaway success of the product. However, not only was the iPhone not Jobs' idea—he actively resisted pursuing the project for several years. (A team of key staff members worked in secret in defiance of his refusal to authorize the work. Their meetings began before the turn of the century. The first iPhone was released in June 2007.) Jobs' insistence on secrecy contributed to the buzz that surrounded the phone in the months leading up to its release, but during the many years that Apple devoted to designing the iPhone, that same paranoid obsession with secrecy impeded the project's progress by compartmentalizing the staff. "Of all the complaints about working at Apple . . .," Merchant writes, "its secrecy was at the top of the list—engineers and designers found it set up unnecessary divisions between employees who might otherwise have collaborated." And Jobs' notoriously volcanic temper and his sometimes abusive treatment of employees may have forced many of them to work longer and harder on the phone than otherwise would have been the case. But it's difficult to believe that morale wouldn't have suffered as a result—and I know from decades of experience as an employer that low morale takes a toll on productivity.As Merchant makes clear, "The story of the iPhone starts . . . not with Steve Jobs or a grand plan to revolutionize phones, but with a misfit crew of software designers and hardware hackers tinkering with the next evolutionary step in human-computer symbiosis." And a truly fascinating tale it is. Ultimately, hundreds of people, not just at Apple but at key suppliers such as Corning and Samsung as well, made key contributions to the success of the iPhone. Merchant does his best to identify them by name and interview them.A century of antecedentsOne of the strengths of Merchant's account is the thoroughness with which he studied the history of technology. In doing so, for example, he learned that "[v]isions of iPhone-like devices can be traced back to the late 1800s." A Finnish inventor "successfully file a patent for what appears to be the first truly mobile phone"—in 1917. And "[b]y 1994, Frank Canova had helped IBM not just invent but bring to market a smart-phone that anticipated most of the core functions of the iPhone." Thirteen years before Apple's product announcement!The world's most profitable product?Merchant frequently refers to the iPhone as "the world's most profitable product." For one thing, it didn't start out that way. Initial sales of the phone were disappointing. Jobs had steadfastly refused to let outside developers supply apps to run on the iPhone. Only when he relented at last and allowed the opening of the App Store did sales explode upwards—and explode they did. Certainly, the profits Apple realizes from the phone are now massive, and it accounts for two-thirds of the company's revenue. Where else might Apple's cash hoard of more than $250 billion have come from? But is it the world's most profitable product? That strikes me as hyperbole. Like other journalists, Merchant clearly fell prey to the fallacy that only huge corporations matter. Although Time lists the iPhone as #1 on its list, the magazine qualifies that claim with the statement that it is "one of the world’s most profitable products." And Merchant's extravagant use of language doesn't stop with his assertion about the phone's profitability. For example, "The iPhone might actually be the pinnacle product  of all of capitalism to this point." Later, he adds, "The iPhone isn't just a tool; it's the foundational instrument of modern life." Really? As of last year, iPhone sales passed one billion units. But there are more than 7.4 billion people on the planet.

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 it to finish the book. That's not to say I didn't like it and I learned a lot about the iPhone. One last note I am Die-Hard Apple fan but Apple has become the greedy and sometimes heartless corporation(we all detest) with profits margin for iPhone at 40-70% and suicide factory in China and Apple workers in stores barely making above minimum wages is something I hope changes. On looking forward to reading it, the textbook style disappointed me but nevertheless I recommend it especially if you love the iPhone.

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 critical eye over some of Merchant's adventures in the book. In particular inside the Foxconn industrial complex.On a more positive note, Merchant's vision is grander than previous authors. One man's mission to pull all the intellectual threads together on what made up the iPhone. The iPhone moves from becoming the child of an over-worked and under-appreciated Apple engineering team to being the totem of a global village.If you've read a quality newspaper you know what he's going to say about the global supply chain. He also touches on the decades of software and technology development that led up to the iPhone.  How its multi-touch interface came out of a 1990s doctoral thesis. Ultimately the value of Merchant's book many not be his writing, but instead becoming a new template for journalists writing on Silicon Valley to look beyond the David & Goliath mono-myth and instead dig into the tangled history of innovation.

Quite a tome to plough through, but a compelling and fascinating history of the iPhone. Busts the myth that Steve Jobs alone invented the iPhone.

I found this book really difficult to finish. It was just boring, and with virtually nothing by way of new insight. Not quite sure how it made the shortlist for the FT/McKinsey business book of the year: probably mostly on account of a good title.

If you are fasinsted by Apple or Corporation start ups that have a story of ups and downs this is a must read. Well written and laid out, good amount of detail that is interesting to keep reading. Page tuner.

An eye opening reveal into what it took to make the iphone and all of the people/technology involved. Certainly took away the perception of it being a one man Job, pun intended.