The Whole Widget

On a January morning in 2007, a slight man in a black turtleneck walked onto a stage in San Francisco and, in ninety minutes, made most of the electronics in the world's pockets obsolete. "An iPod. A phone. An internet communicator," he repeated, letting the audience guess, until he stopped pretending: "These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone." It was the second time Steve Jobs had reinvented the world, and it would not be the last. This is the story of Apple and the man who made it in his own image — begun in a suburban garage in 1976, driven to the brink of bankruptcy, and rebuilt into the most valuable company on Earth. Here is the whole arc: the Apple II and the birth of the personal computer; the Macintosh and the war with IBM and Microsoft; Jobs's exile and the wilderness years at NeXT and Pixar; his stunning return; and the cascade that followed — iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, the App Store, and a design obsession that reshaped how billions of people live. It is also the story of the flawed, mercurial man himself: charismatic and cruel, visionary and impossible, a college dropout who insisted the products be beautiful all the way through — "the whole widget." Drawing on the long shelf of Apple literature and the public record, and honest about where the company's polished myth meets the messier truth, this is the definitive account of how a small team in a garage changed the modern world — and what it cost, and what it means, to build the future one insanely great thing at a time.