“The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone” Book Available for Pre-Order

A new book by tech journalist Brian Merchant titled “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone” is releasing on June 20th, just days before the 10th anniversary of the original iPhone on June 29th. The book traces the iPhone’s untold origin, from Kenyan mines to Chinese factories all the way to One Infinite Loop, and how it fundamentally transformed how we interact with technology, culture, and each other.

The Verge has published an exclusive excerpt of the book today, which is said to contain exclusive interviews with iPhone’s engineers, inventors, and developers:

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 iPhone is the reason I’m divorced,” Andy Grignon, a senior iPhone engineer, tells me. I heard that sentiment more than once throughout my dozens of interviews with the iPhone’s key architects and engineers. “Yeah, the iPhone ruined more than a few marriages,” says another.

You can pre-order the hardcover of the book on Amazon.ca for $32.16 and Kindle edition as well. In the meantime, you can read the lengthy excerpt at this link.