Like the best historians, Merchant, an American journalist and editor of Vice Media’s technology blog, Motherboard, unpacks the history of the iPhone in a way that makes it seem both inevitable in its outline and surprising in its details ... Some of the best sections in The One Device involve Merchant going out to recover some of these forgotten pioneers ... In sections scattered throughout the book, Merchant tries to wrestle with the moral price of a single iPhone...What should we do with this information? The very complexity of a device such as the iPhone makes it difficult to conduct the sort of moral calculus which can be applied to simpler commodities such as diamonds or gold. A wide-ranging history like Merchant’s is the start of an answer.
Merchant does the important work of excavating and compiling large numbers of details and anecdotes about the development of the iPhone, many of them previously unrecorded ... The iPhone is designed for maximum efficiency and compactness. The One Device isn’t. The three chapters on the development of the iPhone are the heart of the book, but there’s some filler too ... Even worse is Merchant’s ghastly time-traveling habit. In order to talk about magnetometers we first have to sit still for a history lesson ('compasses can be traced back at least as far as the Han dynasty, around 206 B.C.') ... But when he gets back to the actual iPhone’s creation, Merchant tells a far richer story than I — having covered Apple for years as a journalist — have seen before ... The iPhone masquerades as a thing not made by human hands. Merchant’s book makes visible that human labor, and in the process dispels some of the fog and reality distortion that surround the iPhone. The One Device isn’t definitive, but it’s a start.
When Merchant focuses on the basic history, he's in good territory ... Merchant connected with many of the key engineers from the iPhone team, which isn't an easy thing to do, as Apple frowns on current and past employees talking in an un-controlled environment. He expands the story by spending time in China, where more than 200 million iPhones are mass-produced yearly, at the Foxconn plants ... But I missed the parts of the story that Merchant left out. He decided not to focus on the birth and growth of Google's Android operating system, which now has an 85 percent market share, or the rise of Apple's chief rival Samsung, and the Galaxy S line of smartphones. He skips out on how Tim Cook, who took over as CEO of Apple after Jobs' death in 2011, has been skimpy on innovation, but has built the iPhone into an even bigger business that now represents two-thirds of Apple's revenues.
