Don't waste your money. If you look up Phil and Tony's twitter accounts, they already are saying that a bunch of it never happened. And the writer basically replied with "Thats just what I heard". Capitalizing on alternative facts 
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'The One Device' Explores the Creation of the iPhone, the Technology That Went Into It, and More
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"The Soul of a New Machine" won a Pulitzer, and is indeed a must read for engineers and anyone else who wants to know what it's really like creating a new product, with horrible deadlines, and with marketing coming in and messing with your original clean design
It would be wonderful if the same author did a story on the iPhone; it would be a tense compelling read, one that would make sense to engineers / designers, and yet also explained to the layman.
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OTOH, from the excerpts of this new book, it feels like this author doesn't have the background to be able to pick out what really happened. After all, most of the people who worked on it were kept separated (UI people never saw the device, and hardware people never saw the UI), so most people's memories will be like blind men describing an elephant, or even things they heard from someone else.
He also mashes events together, and seems to overly simplify important details. e.g.
More than just considered. Jobs hired outside experts to help him approach Cingular in mid 2005 about setting up Apple as an MVNO and selling full service at $49 a month. Cingular saw it as too risky and refused Jobs' idea. - Project Vogue
Apple approached Verizon in mid 2005 about selling a new phone, but Verizon saw no benefit in Apple taking away customer relationships that Verizon considered important, like the ability to sell through Verizon's retail partners (which ironically has happened since then).
In fact, it would take more than an year... until mid 2006... before Apple figured out how to entice Cingular with more realistic numbers and benefits as a device that would improve customer revenue and lessen churn.
In short, with nothing to demo until the end of 2006, nobody was clamoring (yet) to sell an unknown Apple phone. Especially after seeing the 2005 ROKR "iTunes Phone", which Jobs had crippled by limiting it to 100 songs so it would not compete with the iPod. Apple really had no choice by mid-2006 but to do whatever AT&T wanted, including an exclusive. Apple likes to paint it as if they came out on top, but AT&T has said they think Apple gave up much more.
Still, I'm going to get a copy of the book, in hopes of picking out new tidbits of info.
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Actually, the writer said he has the recording of Tony saying exactly what was in the book, verbatim. Tony seems to be trying to backpedal on his quote in the book now that he sees how it looks on paper, but he hasn't explained why he's now saying his own words are "not true."Don't waste your money. If you look up Phil and Tony's twitter accounts, they already are saying that a bunch of it never happened. And the writer basically replied with "Thats just what I heard". Capitalizing on alternative facts
