After Steve

Mickle, who covered Apple for the Wall Street Journal and later the New York Times, wrote about the company after Steve Jobs's death, organised around Tim Cook and Jony Ive as representatives of two functions that had previously been held in balance.

His argument is that Jobs's contribution was to hold operational discipline and product design in productive tension, and that after his death the two separated. Cook, an operations executive, optimised the supply chain, the services business, the capital return programme and the relationship with China, and the company's market value increased enormously. Ive, whose authority over design had been protected by Jobs, lost the executive counterpart who could translate design ambition into company priority, took on responsibilities including the retail stores and the campus, and eventually left.

The reporting covers the Apple Watch's development and the shift in its positioning from a fashion object to a health device; the abandoned automobile project and the resources it consumed; the growth of the services business including the App Store and its economics; the China relationship, including the commitments made to the government and the concentration of manufacturing; and the succession of product decisions after Ive's departure.

Mickle is more sympathetic to Ive than to Cook, and the framing rests on a judgement about what Apple lost that readers may weigh differently given the financial outcome.

The book relies on interviews with many former employees and the company did not cooperate. It ends before the Vision Pro and before the current period of regulatory pressure on the App Store. The account of how design authority operated inside the company, and what happened when the executive protection for it disappeared, is the most substantial part.