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WHAT DOES A SILICON VALLEY ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE PIONEER have in common with Bolivian tin miners equipped with pickaxes and dynamite? With Chilean men and boys extracting lithium from underground brine pools? With Chinese workers in assembly plants that management has ringed with netting to deter suicides? With a wildly successful yet conscience-stricken videogame designer in Hanoi? As reported by Brian Merchant in The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, all these people and many more were players in the making of what may be the hottest gadget in human history.
It’s a remarkable tale, one that takes us well beyond the predictable panorama of late-night coding sessions and choreographed Apple product launches (though we see those as well). Instead, Mr. Merchant goes deep into the guts of the device that has made Apple the most valuable publicly traded company on the planet.
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The author, an editor at the online publication Motherboard, is nothing if not obsessive. This is a man who really, really wanted to get inside his iPhone. Apple doesn’t make it easy—like many of the company’s devices, it is sealed shut with tamper-resistant screws—and Mr. Merchant wasn’t satisfied with spreading its innards out on a workbench in any case. He took the thing to a lab and had it pulverized to find out what it’s made of: lots of aluminum, carbon, iron and oxygen (from various oxides); some silicon, copper and cobalt; much smaller amounts of more than 20 other elements; and traces of rare-earth minerals like cerium and yttrium.

THE ONE DEVICE: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Little, Brown, 407 pages, $28