The One Device

by Brian Merchant

  7. Sensing Motion

  A visit to the Musée des Arts et Métiers kicked off this chapter; in addition to housing the famed pendulum, it’s also home to the Jacquard loom, Pascal’s calculator, and other early computer ancestors. Sid Harza helped explain MEMS tech to the humble layman—myself—while Brian Huppi explained how Apple developed the sensors here, and Brett Bilbrey shed more light on sensor development in general. The articles by Economist writer Glenn Fleishman on GPS were a useful reference. For accelerometers, Patrick L. Walter’s “The History of the Accelerometer,” published in Sound and Vibration, provided exactly that. Arman Amin’s thread about the motion coprocessor can be found on Reddit at r/Apple.

  8. Strong-ARMed

  There’s no way to cram the entire history of computers or computer processors into a single chapter, so consider this the highlight reel of two of the most crucial events: the birth of the transistor and the establishment of Moore’s law. It’s interesting to note that the transistor kicked open the door for the cell phone, which was created almost immediately after the former’s discovery at Bell Labs. James Gleick’s The Information offered a historical framework, and Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators provided context for the rise of the transistor.

  The Apollo Guidance Computer had 4,100 NOR gates, each with three transistors—that’s 12,300 transistors. According to Paul Ledak, a former IBM microprocessor exec, that means that as of 2015, the iPhone 6 had 130,000 times more transistors than the Apollo system. The single-transistor hearing aid is described at the online Semiconductor Museum.

  I interviewed Alan Kay at his Brentwood home; he suggested I read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I did, and I recommend you do too. It’s a trenchant critique of our entertainment-addled culture, now more relevant than ever—but I digress. I interviewed Sophie Wilson over FaceTime and she graciously allowed me to take up far more of her time poring over the early beginnings of ARM than I should have.

  Ryan Smith of Anandtech gave me crucial context for understanding Apple’s chip-development game, and an interview with industry analyst Horace Dediu yielded insight into the rise of the app economy from an insider’s perspective. David Edgerton and Adam Rothstein helped provide historical context in email correspondence, pointing out that the app economy could be a new name for an old series of services. I interviewed Joel Comm by phone to get an example of an early app success.

  Former Apple employees on Team iPhone—Henri Lamiraux, Nitin Ganatra, and Andy Grignon chief among them—provided insight into how and why the App Store was resisted and then rolled out. Interviews with Muthuri Kinyamu, Erik Hersman, Nelson Kwame, and Eleanor Marchant, among others, helped me understand how the mobile app shaped Kenya’s tech industry and start-up scene.

  9. Noise to Signal

  An interview with Jon Agar provides this crash course on the history of wireless networks. The core papers of the ALOHAnet project are available for free online and offer a peek into the birth of Wi-Fi. Christoph Herzig of Philips offered insight into the booming of distributed networks and touted SmartPoles as the future, though I didn’t have space to include them. In 2012, ProPublica and PBS did an excellent series on the human toll that tower maintenance takes. Tower deaths are tracked and updated by Wireless Estimator. The smartphone ownership data comes from a 2016 comScore report.

  10. Hey, Siri

  The backbone of the Siri chapter is a lengthy interview conducted with Tom Gruber, Apple’s head of advanced development for Siri. Artificial intelligence is obviously a loaded topic—I attempted to approach it through the lens of what Siri actually does, or tries to do. The first stop on any AI reading list is Alan Turing’s classic “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Additional research concerned the Hearsay II papers. The Oral History Collection at the Charles Babbage Institute is a great resource, and the interview conducted with Raj Reddy is no different; it provides a fascinating look at the life of one of the first AI pioneers. I also drew from published talks Reddy has given. The figures about Siri and the number of requests it receives are published by Apple and have not been independently corroborated.

  11. A Secure Enclave

  Def Con is fertile ground for anyone looking for a crash course on cybersecurity; I spent the days in Las Vegas hanging out with hackers and interviewing early iPhone jailbreakers and analysts. I also attended Black Hat, where I heard Apple head of security Ivan Krsti´c’s talk about the secure enclave, something that baffled even the pro cybersecurity reporters around me. Further information, expertise, and context came from interviews with security expert Dan Guido, iPhone Dev Team jailbreaker David Wang (@planetbeing), and Ronnie Tokazowski, who works for PhishMe. Apple has published fairly detailed descriptions of how the secure enclave works, but few can confirm exactly how it does what it says it does. Some background comes from David Kushner’s profile of George Hotz, aka Geohot, for the New Yorker, and a catalog of the effects of Cydia’s influence on iOS was documented in Alex Heath’s article “Apple Owes the Jailbreak Community an Apology.”

  12. Designed in California, Made in China

  There’s been a lot of great reporting about labor conditions in China’s electronics factories, not least of which the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize–winning series on the iEconomy by Charles Duhigg, Keith Bradsher, and David Barboza. China Labor Watch is an invaluable resource, as is the labor-academic group SACOM. I interviewed Li Qiang with a translator in the summer of 2016. Liam Young of Unknown Fields Division provided context concerning the supply chain and working conditions in China in a meeting before I departed.

  My fixer and translator, Wang Yang—we’ve chosen to use a pseudonym to protect her identity—was a tremendous help in getting factory workers to talk. She’s a big reason we spoke to a couple dozen sources over the course of a handful of visits. We visited Foxconn’s Longhua and Guanlan and Pegatron’s Shanghai factory, as well as supplier factories such as TSMC, the chip fabricator. Of the Foxconn employees, Xu, Zhao, and their friend were the most candid, but many factory workers were willing to speak to us outside the gates, at lunchtime noodle shops, and at the local market. From these interviews, combined with research from the above sources, I feel confident I was able to capture a solid snapshot of the state of play at China’s electronics factories.

  I did in fact sneak into Longhua by virtue of my having to use the bathroom—this is potentially a crime of trespassing in China, but I feel it is justified due to the history of abuse and tight media controls by Foxconn. It seemed to me it would be a public service to get a fair and un-spun image of the factory.

  The number of steps necessary to produce a phone was documented by ABC’s Nightline—though that was in 2012, and the number is likely considerably greater today, as the devices have only continued to become more complex. Suicide victim Xu Lizhi had his poems, including “A Screw Fell to the Ground,” collected and published in the Shenzhen News.

  The innovations in Ford’s assembly line were detailed in David Hounshell’s From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932, and that book is the source of the “Pa” Klann quotes. Stephen L. Sass’s history of materials science, The Substance of Civilization, posits that mass production began millennia ago.

  13. Sellphone

  To understand why Apple is so popular, you have to understand why it’s so good at creating spectacle—and you have to go to an Apple Event. Like rock concerts for products, they somehow get your blood running, even if you’re fully aware you’re watching a well-produced infomercial. David E. Nye’s The American Technological Sublime helped me understand this phenomenon; beyond the Wright brothers, he looks at Edison and the Hoover Dam.

  The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance, who edited the technology section for years, wrote about the difficulties of covering secretive technology companies for Nieman Journalism Lab. Our phone interview interrogated that phenomenon. The top editorial staff of iPhoneLife magazine participated in an interview call during which I tried to suss
out what it was like to write about the iPhone daily for a living. In a phone interview, Cory Moll detailed what forming a union at Apple was like. Mark Spoonauer provided context as a tech editor and longtime vet of Apple Events. I interviewed a couple dozen Apple Store employees, but covertly, which is why I didn’t publish any of their quotes in the text—retail reps aren’t allowed to speak to the press. I also interviewed perhaps a dozen customers waiting in line on launch day.

  As for the Tim Cook email episode—an Apple PR rep confirmed that Tim had opened my email and forwarded it on; she said he had read it first. Streak’s representatives told me that their technology could “very accurately” determine which device a person used to open an email. There are still other explanations, of course—the PR rep didn’t have the right information, Cook was using a VPN that outsourced his traffic, or his emails get outsourced somewhere that uses Windows.

  14. Black Market

  Little could be confirmed about the iPhone black market I visited in the summer of 2016—no one would speak to journalists, though its sheer size belied the notion that it was some secret operation. However, Adam Minter, an expert on e-waste and secondhand markets who was interviewed for this chapter, returned to the same location months later. The entire thing was gone. Much good reporting has been done on the woes of Guiyu, led by Basel Action Network’s research. A 60 Minutes segment tracked U.S. waste there in 2008. Estimates of waste flows were sourced from the United Nations University.

  i–iV

  The first two Apple sections, i and ii, are based primarily on interviews with the team responsible for carving out the interaction paradigms that formed the foundation of the iPhone—the user interface, the multitouch software, the early hardware. I conducted interviews with Bas Ording, Imran Chaudhri, Brian Huppi, Joshua Strickon, and Greg Christie, in addition to other members of the original iPhone team on background. Further details and quotes from Jony Ive were taken from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive, and Brett Schlender’s Becoming Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs “misremembered” the iPhone’s touchscreen genesis in a Q-and-A hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at their annual D: All Things Digital conference.

  As with the previous roman numbered sections, most of chapters iii and iV were sourced from interviews with original iPhone team members and anonymous Apple employees, previous research and reportage, and court- and FOIA-obtained documents. Among Apple personnel interviewed on the record were Bas Ording, Imran Chaudhri, Richard Williamson, Tony Fadell, Henri Lamiraux, Greg Christie, Nitin Ganatra, Andy Grignon, David Tupman, Evan Doll, Abigail Brody, Brian Huppi, Joshua Strickon, and Tom Gruber.

  Quotes were drawn from the Apple/Samsung trial of 2012, when Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall took the stand. Books that provided extraordinarily useful detail, research, and background were Dogfight, by Fred Vogelstein; Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson; Becoming Steve Jobs, by Brent Schlender; Inside Apple, by Adam Lashinsky; and Jony Ive, by Leander Kahney. Quotes attributed to Jony Ive, Steve Jobs, Mike Bell, and Douglas Satzger were drawn from those sources. John Markoff’s New York Times reporting and Steven Levy’s book The Perfect Thing and his work in Newsweek were used for reference.

  Sales figures cited are provided by Apple unless otherwise stated.

  Acknowledgments

  A key theme of this book is that little progress is possible without deep collaboration and sustained collective effort—nothing could be truer about writing this thing too. It simply wouldn’t have happened without the support of family, friends, colleagues, and even, sometimes, near-strangers. The book about what made the one device possible would not be possible without any and all of them. In a way, we all wrote this book.

  First and foremost, my incomprehensibly supportive wife, Corrina: Not only did she make huge sacrifices to ensure I could finish this on a truly insane timeline, but she was a powerful critic, editor, and idea-generator for the book itself. Her thoughts on where I should take the thing next were often better than mine. She may also be the only person who’s more sick of hearing about the iPhone than I am. I can’t thank her enough. I also want to thank my one-year-old son, Aldus, mostly for existing. Knowing he’d read this thing someday, or at least mainline the data into his cranium through the next one device, made me want to make it better.

  Thanks to Eric Lupfer, who is certainly the best agent I’ve ever met—but also a sharp editor and thinker; without him, this thing wouldn’t exist. And to my editor, Michael Szczerban, whose thoughtful edits helped cohere this slab of a thing into a proper book, and who only belted out a single expletive when I told him the first draft was going to be 200,000 words. The whole team at Little, Brown—Ben Allen, Nicky Guerreiro, Elizabeth Garriga, my science-eyed copyeditor, Tracy Roe, and everyone else—I should add, has been wonderful.

  A huge thanks to my friends and colleagues at Motherboard—large chunks of this book would not have happened without their know-how, assistance, and connections. Jason Koebler went so far above and beyond I actually had to tell him to stop helping me at one point—he used vacation days to accompany me to Chile and Bolivia, acted as a translator and fixer, and arranged our visit to Cerro Rico, and beyond all that, his insights, ideas, and reporting on technology were and are an invaluable resource. Lorenzo Franceschi-Biccherrai, one of the best cybersecurity reporters anywhere, stepped away from the mainframe long enough to lend me his know-how, expertise, and spare hotel bed at Def Con. He hacked into my computer to give the security chapter a close read, and if I got anything wrong, it’s because he stole my password and changed it. Thanks to Nicholas Deleon, who shared his Apple contacts and insights into the consumer tech sphere with me, and is the reason I was able to get into the Apple Events and discover the joys of corresponding with Apple PR. I hope they still talk to you after this!

  Thanks to Wang Yang, my fixer and translator in China, whose gumption and enthusiasm got us further than I ever would have alone, and to Eleanor Marchant, a gracious and knowledgeable guide to Nairobi’s tech scene.

  Thanks also to Claire Evans and Keith Wagstaff, whose close readings of early chapters and the final manuscript provided insight and inspiration. And to Alex Pasternack and Michael Byrne too, whose knowledge of science, technology, and geopolitics made them indispensable informal fact-checkers. Same with Jona Bechtolt, whose encyclopedic knowledge of Apple, thoughts on the industry, and eagerness to land an iPhone 7 on launch day helped me understand Appledom that much better.

  Thanks to my parents, Tom and Sharon, who pitched in to watch the baby, offer words of encouragement, and continued to be the best support system a grown kid could ever hope to have, and to my brother, Ed. Thanks to Tim and Teresa Laughlin, my parents-in-law, who went above and beyond, time and again, offering support whenever I was in the whirlwind of a deadline. And to my wonderful grandparents Joan and Al, who were kind enough to let me use their Palo Alto home as a base whenever I was in Silicon Valley. Julie Carter and Chip Moreland, thanks for the couch, the dive bar, and the dumplings. To Mike Pearl, for almost letting me take apart your iPhone. Thanks to Brian Parisi, for talking shop, and Koren Shadmi, for help with early art. Thanks to Nick Rutherford and Jade Catta-Pretta, for your ears, support, and putting me up in New York. Thanks to Alexis Madrigal and Geoff Manaugh for reading the manuscript, to Tim Maughan, Robin Sloan, and Liam Young for sharing notes and talking iPhone.

  Thanks to the whole crew at iFixit, especially Kyle Wiens and Andrew Goldberg, who helped kick off this journey and provided essential resources throughout. To Adam Minter, my fortuitous guide to iPhone junk. To Yoni Heisler, who was kind enough to share court documents he’d pried out of PACER. To Fred Vogelstein, who shared notes from his own amazing reporting on Apple. To Bryan Gardiner, for talking Gorilla Glass with me. And to Ashlee Vance, for offering some words of criticism and encouragement when he certainly didn’t have to—and ultimately kicked my ass into writing a better book.

  Thanks also to Eric Nelson, who helped get the ball rollin
g.

  Finally, I want to thank the many interview subjects, especially those who risked their jobs or station to help me tell a truer story about the one device, and those who do strenuous, dangerous, and unappreciated work to bring it to life.

  About the Author

  Brian Merchant is an editor at Motherboard, VICE’s science and technology outlet, and the founder of Terraform, its online fiction outlet. His work has appeared in the Guardian, Slate, Fast Company, Discovery, GOOD, Paste, Grist, and beyond. To trace the story of the iPhone, he traveled to every inhabited continent, from the Bolivian highlands to the megalopolis of Shenzhen, using the “one device” to document the effort. He took 8,000 photos, recorded 200 hours of interviews, tapped out hundreds of notes, and had dozens of FaceTime sessions with his family back home. He went through three different iPhones: an iPhone 6, whose screen was broken and repaired three times, a black-market 4S that he bought in China but was stolen in Chile, and an iPhone 7 he snapped up on its launch day.

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