Beneath the glass
I still remember the day in January, a little more than 10 years ago, when I leapt from my seat at Moscone West to phone in a report of Apple’s latest device: a cumbersome evolution of the iPod with a rotary-phone-style click wheel at its base.
It was a joke Steve Jobs played on the audience — and his colleagues. Apple never released an iPod phone; instead, Jobs revealed a flat brick of glass, metal and plastic that would change the world.
The iPod phone was quite real, it turns out, as we learn in “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.” Apple was trying to figure out whether to build on the iPod’s simple, compact software underpinnings or cram the Mac’s operating system down into a handheld touch-screen. The iPod phone made it pretty far, with calls being placed on prototypes. The radio hardware in it — the parts that put the “phone” in “iPhone” — came from the competing device.
So it was pleasing to learn, a decade late, that Jobs wasn’t just goofing around in his iPhone presentation; the iPod phone slide in his keynote was an inside joke, a gibe at the expense of his colleagues who made
a device that never came to life.
Sadly, there are precious few secrets like that in this secret history, largely because it tries to detach the making of the iPhone from Apple’s late co-founder, that infinitely engaging and enraging figure who’s become the subject of many books and movies.
If there’s one lesson in this ambitious history of the iPhone, it’s the falseness of the Edison myth. The notion that a solitary inventor, toiling away in defiance of conventional wisdom, can be responsible for a breakthrough falls apart under the complexity of modern, globe-spanning technology, whose complex supply chains and intricate dependencies require not just a team of people at the center but a vast web of co-conspirators to move things forward.
Yes, Jobs’ legendary foresight and stubbornness — ably documented in places like Walter Isaacson’s welltold biography — turned the iPhone from a troubled R&D project in the bowels of Infinite Loop to the driver of the world’s most valuable company. But it took a village of people to realize his dream.
There are enough unsung heroes in the making of the iPhone to occupy a worthy ground-level history of the making of a device. But Brian Merchant’s breezy vignettes about Andy Grignon, Greg Christine, Imran Chaudhri and the like amount to barely a jingle to hum.
The problem is that Merchant seems to want to cram all of his reporter’s notebooks into one overstuffed tale. Zooming from the desolate lithium mines of the Atacama Desert to the thrumming Longhua phone factory in Shenzhen, China, to a hackers’ den in Las Vegas and a cruise ship off the shores of Papua New Guinea and, near the end, a waste dump in Nairobi, Kenya, Merchant takes readers on a wild ride. If you’ve found yourself bouncing from app to app to app, pushed by notifications, then you’ve got a good feel for the disjointed experience of reading “The One Device.”
Merchant is at his best when he’s vigorously debunking the lone-inventor fable. “Collectives, teams, multiple inventors, building on a shared history,” he writes. “That’s how a core, universally adopted technology emerges.” This book is his attempt to demonstrate that truth.
In debunking Edison, though, Merchant ends up proving why the narrative of the lone inventor is so irresistible. There’s no main character in the book, except perhaps for Merchant himself — and we signed up for a secret history of the iPhone, not a geek-tourism travelogue. Whisked from place to place, we never settle anywhere long enough to care. Episodes of long nights spent by engineers fretting over user interfaces at Apple headquarters are interspersed, with no particular thought as to their order, with long essays on the history of image sensors and computer chips and wireless radios.
This approach, history as an ingredient list, might remind one of Mark Kurlansky’s “Cod” and “Salt.” But those biographies of everyday goods had an organization and rigor that turned them into gripping reads. Merchant finds himself, against all odds, inside the security gates at a Chinese factory complex that churns out iPhones by the millions. He is drawn, more than anything, to a 7-Eleven that serves employees, a perfect replica of the American convenience-store chain. The book is littered with such oddball observational digressions, feeding the sense that there’s no thread to follow.
Perhaps the book should have been two separate ones: a making-of tale centered in Cupertino, profiling the iPhone’s little-known fathers and mothers, and a Kurlansky-esque look at how all the pieces of the iPhone come together (and, eventually, get shredded apart as e-waste). Either of those sounds worth a read. As I read the two tales crammed together, I found myself longing to touch the flat surface of my iPhone and find somewhere else to transport my mind.