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

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 secret history iphone book
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

macduke Avatar
90 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.
Score: 19 Votes (Like | Disagree)
vvs14 Avatar
90 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...
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
BornAgainMac Avatar
90 months ago
Sounds like the iPhone Rapture at Apple campus.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
marvz Avatar
90 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.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
macduke Avatar
90 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.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
usarioclave Avatar
90 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.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Popular Stories

maxresdefault

Apple Announces 'Let Loose' Event on May 7 Amid Rumors of New iPads

Tuesday April 23, 2024 7:11 am PDT by
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple Vision Pro Dual Loop Band Orange Feature 2

Apple Cuts Vision Pro Shipments as Demand Falls 'Sharply Beyond Expectations'

Tuesday April 23, 2024 9:44 am PDT by
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
iPad And Calculator App Feature

Apple Finally Plans to Release a Calculator App for iPad Later This Year

Tuesday April 23, 2024 9:08 am PDT by
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
iOS 17 All New Features Thumb

iOS 17.5 Will Add These New Features to Your iPhone

Sunday April 21, 2024 3:00 am PDT by
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Apple Silicon AI Optimized Feature Siri

Apple Releases Open Source AI Models That Run On-Device

Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
iPhone 15 Pro FineWoven

Apple Reportedly Stops Production of FineWoven Accessories

Sunday April 21, 2024 6:03 am PDT by
Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories, according to the Apple leaker and prototype collector known as "Kosutami." In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future. Kosutami has revealed...