The Whole Widget

About This Book

In 1976 two young men in a California garage sold hand-soldered circuit boards to hobbyists. Fifty years later the company they founded became the first business in history worth four trillion dollars. Between those two facts lies one of the greatest stories in the history of commerce — and at its center, a college dropout who was given up at birth, thrown out of the company he built, exiled for a decade, and who came back to remake the world.

This is the whole arc, told whole: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and the blue boxes; the Apple II that built an industry and the Macintosh that defined a design philosophy; the humiliating exile at NeXT and Pixar that turned out to be the making of him; the return, and the greatest second act in business — the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. And then the story keeps going: Tim Cook and the supply chain, the watches and the earbuds and the services and the homemade silicon, the trillions, the reckonings over labor and antitrust and China, and the 2026 handoff to a new chief executive.

Drawing on the standard biographies, the public record, and the accounts of the people who were in the room, E.B Cohen tells the fifty-year history of Apple and its founder honestly — holding the legend against the ledger, weighing the genius against the cruelty, the beautiful objects against the shadows they cast, and asking, at the last, what Steve Jobs really built, and whether it can outlast him.