Jefferson Graham , USA TODAY 12:04 p.m. EDT June 19, 2017

by Brian Merchant

(Little, Brown and Company)

in Non-Fiction

In the last 10years, the Apple iPhone has changed our lives in more ways than we can imagine.

Remember when we went to restaurants and walked down the street without staring at oursmartphones? How we checked our e-mail once or twice a day instead of every minute and had a work-free weekend without touching basewith co-workers and bosses?

Thank the iPhone for the always-on culture, for building the app economy that brought ride-hailing cab alternatives, visual dating tools and the constant sharing of upload-from-anywhere travel photos.

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the iPhoneon June 29, there's a great book in this, and not just the birth of the iPhone, but how it's evolved in the last decadeas well.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone(Little, Brown, 380pp., **out of four stars) by Brian Merchant, an editor at Motherboard, isn't it, unfortunately.

In a nutshell, Merchant's bookdwells on Apple's penchant for secrecy (old news,don't we all know this?) and expands beyond the basic story of the device's birth with long passages on the history of touch screen, gyroscopes and other smartphone features.

In this Jan. 9, 2007, file photo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up an iPhone at the Macworld Conference in San Francisco.(Photo: Paul Sakuma, AP)

The iPhone wasn't just Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' idea. Credit goes to an overworked and under-appreciatedteam of engineers who did the grunt work and came up with many of the features. When Merchant focuses on the basic history, he's in good territory. It's a great story with Jobs changing his mind on several key details at the last minute, andthe iPhone not being finished and looking like it wouldn't make the planned Jan.7, 2007 reveal at the Macworldconference. (It went on sale six months later.)

Merchant connected with many of the key engineers from the iPhone team, which isn't an easy thing to do, as Apple frowns oncurrent and past employees talking in an un-controlled environment. He expands the story by spending time in China, where more than200 million iPhones are mass-produced yearly, at the Foxconn plants. He somehow manages to sneak in to the ultra-secretive facility, where many workers have responded to the crushing hours and mind-numbing work by committing suicide from the top of the building.

But I missed the parts of the story that Merchant left out. Hedecided not to focus on the birthand growth of Google's Android operating system, which now has an 85 percentmarket share, or the rise of Apple's chief rival Samsung, and the Galaxy S line of smartphones.

Author Brian Merchant.(Photo: Cara Robbins)

He skipsout on how Tim Cook, who took over as CEO of Apple after Jobs' death in 2011, has been skimpy on innovation, but has built the iPhone into an even bigger business that now represents two-thirds of Apple's revenues. Nary a word is said about the iPad, the Apple Watchor what Apple will do when the inevitable happensand the life cycle for the iPhone comes to an end.

Well, the material is there. Perhaps it's time to get to work on the sequel.

See the rest here:

'The One Device': How the iPhone changed our lives - USA TODAY