The book traces the evolution and end of Ive and Cook’s partnership, involving compendious review of public sources and over 200 interviews with current and former Apple employees and advisers ... Mickle builds a dense, granular mosaic of the firm’s trials and triumphs ... In the epilogue, Mickle drops his reporter’s detachment to apportion responsibility for the firm’s failure to launch another transformative product. Cook is blamed for being aloof and unknowable, a bad partner for Ive ... By the end, the sense that the two missed a chance to create a worthy successor to the iPhone is palpable. It’s also hooey, and the best evidence for that is the previous 400 pages. It’s true that after Jobs died, Apple didn’t produce another device as important as the iPhone, but Apple didn’t produce another device that important before he died either. It’s also true that Cook did not play the role of C.E.O. as Jobs had, but no one ever thought he could ... Ive and Cook wanted another iPhone, but, as Mickle’s exhaustive reporting makes clear, there was not another such device to be made ... Epilogue aside, the book is an amazingly detailed portrait of the permanent tension between strategy and luck: Companies make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.

There’s little confusion as to Mickle’s sympathies. From the get-go we see Ive through a gauzy lens ... Cook, in contrast, is a stiff intruder in Apple’s magical kingdom, and damned by faint praise ... The Cook-versus-Ive narrative is an effective, if reductive, device for telling the post-Jobs story of Apple. It injects human drama into a spot-on portrayal of a thriving, if angst-ridden, corporation ... Mickle argues convincingly that Cook did what needed to be done for the company to prosper, to the benefit of shareholders, employees, and himself ... This is an exhaustively reported, deeply sourced, and lively book that will delight Apple obsessives for its revealing look behind the curtain at one of the world’s most secretive companies ... There is a delicious level of detail on everything ... The book has its issues. Jobs’s biological father was from Syria, not Iran. The text can be repetitive ... The writing can also be breathy ... The author correctly gives Cook his due.

Informative, if myopic ... Apple’s ethical stances have been pliable, but Mickle doesn’t always hold the company to account ... It’s hard to understand why a spate of worker suicides at a factory assembling Apple products, which continued into the period covered in this book, is only fleetingly mentioned in After Steve ... We’ve allowed Apple’s impressive, addictive devices to reshape our world, but what have we sacrificed in the process? Unfortunately, Mickle’s intense focus on two executives — Cook and Chief Design Officer Jony Ive, who left Apple in 2019 — leaves little room for such considerations ... In its fixation on Apple’s tip-top leadership, After Steve recalls countless exec-obsessed business titles. Nonetheless, Mickle’s reporting yields a thorough, entertaining dual portrait of his protagonists ... Uneven but never boring.

An engrossing narrative that’s impressively reported — a true journalistic achievement in light of Apple’s culture of secrecy — After Steve takes readers deep inside the monolithic company. Mickle’s characterization of Apple’s evolution and its management sometimes seems oversimplified. Yet his book helps us see, in arresting detail, why Apple is Apple — that is, how the company mastered the process of making its devices so welcoming and accessible even as they contain the most complex modern technologies imaginable ... The argument in After Steve is that Apple’s growth and Ive’s alienation are what caused this great American firm, once so creative and unusual, to lose its soul. But to buy into this idea one has to believe that a corporation has a soul — a dubious assumption, I think, that seems tantamount to accepting Jobs’s old pitch that suggested Apple was more than a company that sold things to make money. Rather, it was something closer to a spiritual ideal ... It’s never been true, of course. And toward the end of Mickle’s book this notion — Apple as a fallen company, and a fallen ideal — detracts from an otherwise compelling narrative. Moreover, while the differences between Ive, the creative thinker, and Cook, the profit-driven technocrat, are no doubt real, readers may find the lines Mickle draws to be conceptually problematic. The implication that Cook destroyed Apple’s start-up culture, for instance, may seem naive to business-savvy readers, who will view him — correctly, I believe — as a principled CEO who succeeded at a challenging job by respecting his company’s traditions and looking ahead to the demands of consumers, employees and Wall Street. And I suspect many readers will have difficulty sympathizing with Ive, who seems less the edgy artist and conscience of the company, as we are perhaps meant to think (a 'latter-day Leonardo da Vinci,' as Mickle unfortunately describes him), than a gifted industrial designer with an intuitive feel for the mass market and a predilection for middlebrow culture, like the band Coldplay ... None of this really subtracts from this book’s immense readability. And Mickle’s thematic overreach doesn’t obscure the crisp and detailed view he offers us of Apple’s inner sanctums. Still, readers of After Steve would do well to remember that no matter the company, soul never figures into the equation: The balance in business between growth and creativity has always been exceedingly difficult to strike. Apple made selling beautiful things seem easy. But really, it only looked that way.

If readers encountering Wall Street Journal reporter Tripp Mickle’s new book can get past the whopper in right there in the title – the US Supreme Court notwithstanding, companies don’t have souls – they’re in for a reading experience that’s in equal measures fascinating and subtly soiling ... And always, the book returns to that weird notion, the 'soul' of a phone company. Gradually, over the course of many well-researched and sleekly-written chapters (no book on such a subject has any business being this wonderfully readable), Cook’s pragmatic, materialistic approach transforms Apple into a place where Ive feels like an alien, even though he’s never explicitly alienated by anybody ... That’s where the soiling part breaks in throughout the book, the implication that this pallid Gradgrind sullied the non-financial 'soul' of Apple by turning it into a multi-trillion-dollar company. This is the kind of Saint’s Life that’s only possible in a world of what online commenters refer to as 'late-stage capitalism.' After Steve wallows in this kind of soteriological parsing, and that aspect of the book is purely revolting even though the book itself is tremendously enjoyable. True believers will finish it and gaze at their iPhones with renewed affection – until the new model drops.

Mickle draws from interviews with 200 current and former Apple employees, suppliers, and competitors for his insightful debut, an unsparing take on the company’s post–Steve Jobs era ... There has been plenty written about Jobs and Apple; this sets itself apart with its shrewd look at how and why the company’s culture shifted. Apple devotees and skeptics alike will find much to consider.

A dynamic, eye-opening debut drawing from news articles, court filings, published materials, and hundreds of interviews. The fact that a sizable portion of Mickle’s source material is derived from current and former Apple employees lends his report credence ... Mickle provides expansive histories on both executives, and he shows how their combined influence led the company away from its core values and culture. The author clearly shows the increasing tensions between the two leaders and the ever expanding differences in how each envisioned the future of Apple ... Tech enthusiasts will find this meticulously researched report great fodder for debate on the future of Apple as a tech leader. A focused, perceptive assessment of the evolution of Apple’s alchemy.