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'The One Device' Book Covering 'Secret History' of iPhone Available June 20

Tuesday June 13, 2017 8:33 am PDT by Joe Rossignol

June 29 will mark ten years since the original iPhone went on sale in the United States. And just days before the anniversary, a new book detailing the smartphone's so-called "secret history" is set to be released.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, by technology journalist Brian Merchant, reflects on how the iPhone transformed the world and turned Apple into the most valuable company ever.

An excerpt of the book, which is said to contain exclusive interviews with the engineers, inventors, and developers who guided every stage of the iPhone's creation, has been published on The Verge today:

If you worked at Apple in the mid-2000s, you might have noticed a strange phenomenon afoot: people were disappearing.

It happened slowly at first. One day there’d be an empty chair where a star engineer used to sit. A key member of the team, gone. Nobody could tell you exactly where they went.

“I had been hearing rumblings about, well, it was unclear what was being built, but it was clear that a lot of the best engineers from the best teams had been slurped over to this mysterious team,” says Evan Doll, who was then a software engineer at Apple…

The book can be pre-ordered for $18.50 on Amazon in hardcover format ahead of its release on June 20. It's also available to pre-order on the iBooks Store for $14.99 in digital format for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Tag: iBooks

Top Rated Comments

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macduke

28 months ago

Hard to believe it has been 10 years since I stood in line to get my original 8GB iPhone, which I still have in it's box on my desk at home. My entire life has changed since those early days of college, but I still use an iPhone. My MacRumors account will also be 10 years old soon! I remember making an account so I could leak information about how many iPhones the Apple Store on the Plaza in KC was getting for launch. That post ended up going around that Apple store, and my friend who leaked it to me said they were questioning everyone about it. He was scared for his job for a while, and I felt really bad. I was still fairly new to Apple stuff, even though I had used some Macs in college, and didn't fully realize how severe the secrecy was surrounding every aspect of the company. I had lurked here for a couple years, but didn't realize that even retail secrecy was so high.

Rating: 19 Votes

vvs14

28 months ago

Hmm.. there is a misspelling in the title of the book. For Apple it's not THE iPhone it's just iPhone. Pretty poor to miss that when you write this book.

This is the dumbest thing I have read in a long long time...

Rating: 13 Votes

BornAgainMac

28 months ago

Sounds like the iPhone Rapture at Apple campus.

Rating: 8 Votes

macduke

28 months ago

Haha yeah isn't it crazy? I sold my original to get the 3G, 3G to get 3GS and so on and so forth.

I still have all of the boxes though and even the original bag it came in.

I still remember the feeling I had when I got the phone on launch day. Gotta thank my mom though for giving 15 year old me her debit card hahah.

I felt so elite and cutting edge!

Yeah I had been following the rumors for a while and was saving up. I never bought an iPod because I kept thinking an iPhone was in the works. In college, $599 was a lot of money. I remember it was an AT&T store not far from the temp job I had that summer in KC. They had an area near the entrance after you came in where you could play with the iPhone while waiting in line. I remember the first time I pinched to zoom in Maps, or scrolled Safari, or called my friend from that device. It felt like such a far future device. It was so smooth. I remember thinking that the slab of glass felt really weird on my face compared to other phones. I remember everywhere I went, when I had that phone out, people would crowd around me and ask to see it or wanted to know what I thought about it. It's the closest I've ever felt to possessing magic. It's difficult to describe to kids nowadays. My kids will never know a world without multitouch and constant connectivity.

Rating: 7 Votes

marvz

28 months ago

Hmm.. there is a misspelling in the title of the book. For Apple it's not THE iPhone it's just iPhone. Pretty poor to miss that when you write this book.

Rating: 7 Votes

ibwb

28 months ago

Hmm.. there is a misspelling in the title of the book. For Apple it's not THE iPhone it's just iPhone. Pretty poor to miss that when you write this book.

Apple can say whatever they want in their brand guide but no editor worth their salt will accept that as gospel for their style guide.

Rating: 6 Votes

Packers1958

28 months ago

Samsung's "The History of Galaxy" outsells this ten to one, costs less than half the price and has just as many words.

Plus it comes with an additional 200 pages of unwanted advertising, and then bursts into flames.

Rating: 6 Votes

usarioclave

28 months ago

These three alone were show stoppers for me - my Windows phone could do all the above.

And those things helped WinMo so much that it continued its domination of the mobile phone space.

Rating: 6 Votes

bunnicula

28 months ago

That's different...iPhone is supposed to be referred to as iPhone never The iPhone. When it was released Apple employees went through training teaching them to call it iPhome....Same with them not liking devices pluralized..

But, this isn't retail sales. It's a book accounting the history of an item. That item is "the iPhone."

I absolutely get retail employees being told to refer to it as "iPhone" because you don't want anyone to think that "The iPhone" is the name of the device.

I do not think there is any confusion and this product has been around for 10 years.

Rating: 5 Votes

Ant2369

28 months ago

Umm...what? If you were to write a book about a ball...lets say the round basketball. Would you say The Secret History of Basketball? No, because that would assume you are talking about the sport. You would say Secret History of THE basketball.

Rating: 5 Votes

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