Business bookshelf: Secret history of the iPhone

Brian Merchant, Little, Brown & Company, 407 pages, $28. Before anybody outside Apple — and most inside the company — were aware of it, the project that would become the iPhone was referred to by the code name Purple. No one seems to remember exactly why; it may have been named after a toy purple kangaroo that belonged to one of the engineers. The lab behind badge readers and a metal door was called the Purple Dorm because people worked around the clock through weekends, holidays, vacations and honeymoons. In fact, although it would eventually emerge as the gleaming quintessence of the collaboration between the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Apple's design Magus, Jony Ive, Purple could seem like a nightmare of overwork, insoluble technical tarballs and political infighting. In "The One Device," Brian Merchant, an editor at Motherboard, the science and technology division of Vice, does the important work of excavating and compiling large numbers of details and anecdotes about the development of the iPhone, many of them previously unrecorded. For example, multitouch, the technology that allows the iPhone's touch-screen to track several fingertips at once, was not invented at Apple as Jobs maintained but developed by an engineering Ph.D. at the University of Delaware named Wayne Westerman. Apple bought and refined it. The three chapters on the development of the iPhone are the heart of the book, but there's some filler too. Plus, ghastly history lessons. But Merchant tells a far richer story than the outside world has seen before.